It might take Jon Olson and his family a little while to get used to the change from life in the South Pacific to life in the Pacific Northwest, but probably not as long as it took their luggage.

Olson started to pack up his family’s home at the U.S. Army base on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands in early November, and the last of his items are expected to arrive in Gig Harbor this week.

Those things can happen when you move 4,500 miles or so away from a tiny coral island equally distant from Hawaii, Australia and Japan.

“It really is in the middle of nowhere,” Olson said.

He relocated his family in mid-December to begin work as the new pastor at Peninsula Lutheran Church in Gig Harbor, a position that brings Olson back to his native Northwest after a two-year stint
as the Protestant chaplain at the Army’s Marshall Islands outpost.

Olson grew up in Kirkland and attended Pacific Luthern University in Parkland, and after he studied at a seminary in Minnesota, he returned to the Northwest to work as a pastor, first in Medford, Ore., and then in Auburn.

After five years in Auburn, Olson was contacted by some friends who lived on Kwajalein about an opening for a new Protestant minister. He consulted with his wife, Kim, who suggested he might as well apply and see what happened.

Eventually, the base’s government contractors reached out to him.

“The more I went through the interview process, the more I was drawn to it and felt called to be out there,” Olson said.

The Olsons moved to the Marshall Islands, 11 of which are leased by the United States military. Kwajalein Atoll hosts the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site.

“You really get to know everyone,” Olson said of the island community, where, due to the small living space – the island was only a half-mile wide and three miles long – everyone in the community was around each other most of the time.

Olson said it was common to leave doors unlocked; going next door for a cup of flour while the neighbors were out was seen as a normal part of communal living.

“It’s very different from here – you lock your doors, you drive everywhere,” he said. “If your neighbor came in and took food from you, it’d be a little awkward.”

The idea of pastoral separation didn’t exist on Kwajalein, Olson said, because he was in almost constant contact with his neighbors in his congregation.

“Sometimes here you can go to church on Sunday, and even though Gig Harbor isn’t that big, you might not run into somebody the rest of the week,” he said. “There, you hang out, you preach a couple services, you teach Bible study in the afternoon, and then you’re down at the beach in your swim trunks with your shirt off.”

It’s something that he and his family have missed since they returned stateside, Olson said.

“There is a tendency to be divided, between church life and home life; there, you just have to live one integrated life,” he said. “It should be the same way here. I want people to feel like they have access to me. I don’t want them to feel like they can’t come to my house or something.”

Building and growing that sense of community will be Olson’s mission during the next several months as he settles in at Peninsula Lutheran. He said everyone he’s met so far has been welcoming, and the friendliness of his congregation is something he noticed right away after he flew back from the Marshall Islands in May to interview for the position.

“I really started to develop a fondness for the people here,” Olson said. “I felt like, if they offered the call to me, I would be really foolish to pass it up.”

He had learned of the job through an old connection from Auburn, and although he and his wife hadn’t decided whether they would try to stay on Kwajalein after their two-year contract expired in December, they thought a return to the South Sound was too good a chance to pass up.

Olson’s parents had lived in Gig Harbor for a time, and, while he worked in Auburn, he and Kim lived in Puyallup.

“It’s always felt like home,” Olson said of the area.

Now, the family’s belongings have mostly completed their trans-Pacific journey, and Olson’s two children have enrolled in school.

There’s still some transition work to be done, though.

“The weather’s obviously very different,” said Olson, who plans to take his children intertubing in the mountains soon. “My daughter’s been running all around with her ski coat on.”