In fourth grade, I listed my life’s ambitions in a book titled My Cabbage Patch Kid and Me. I also listed out my Cabbage Patch Kid’s ambitions, which included “sun-bather” and “firefighter.” Don’t ask me how I made those predictions about my yellow-haired doll, but my own list turned out to be pretty accurate:
I had Mother and Teacher covered in my 30s. Sadly, as much as I liked to draw as a child, I will never be any kind of artist. My Cabbage Patch Kid never became a firefighter either, so we don’t always get what we want.
However, as of today, August 29, 2025, at the age of 48, my childhood dream of becoming a “book writer” is actually happening. I signed a book contract with Gospel-Centered Discipleship, which means I am officially writing a real book that will actually be published.
I have devoted my life to Christian missions. Am I guilty of cultural assault?
My job is to hire, onboard, coach, and train new missionaries. Sometimes it’s a bit disconcerting to work in a profession that so many people hate.
A couple of weeks ago, I came across an article from The Guardian: “Missionaries using secret audio devices to evangelise Brazil’s isolated peoples.”
The headline is clickbait for an article that is mostly speculative. Considering that a companion article claims that the same tribe’s longhouses “glow with screens” and are asking for Starlink, I’m not sure they’re as isolated as we imagine.
But it was the comments that got my attention.
Over a thousand negative comments with over 700 shares.
Some are valid accusations. History has shown us plenty of ignorant, arrogant, or destructive missionaries. I met some. Sometimes I was one. In fact, the whole reason I am passionate about my job of preparing and equipping missionaries is because I want to prevent them from making these mistakes. From making mistakes that I made. Anyone who has sat through one of my trainings knows that the thing I say over and over again is to enter another culture with humility.
But I also understand that many people believe that a missionary should never go in the first place. Or that if he does, his work should only be humanitarian. He should never dare to try to persuade someone to change their beliefs.
Grace came home to us from an orphanage when she was ten months old, and is now nineteen. She agreed to have this discussion about adoption and has read what I am posting. I’m so grateful for her vulnerability in sharing these things publicly!
The day she came home
As I look back on how Grace processed adoption, I think she instinctively knew something was wrong in her life even when she was a toddler.
At eighteen months old, she became obsessed with a book where Dora the Explorer helps a baby bird find his mommy. She wanted to read it again and again, becoming agitated or even crying each time the bird was lost and rejoicing when the mama bird was found.
At first, I thought it was cute and nothing more, but then it became a pattern in Grace’s life. I discovered that many toddler books have the theme of a child losing his mother, and Grace became increasingly upset by these books. As she got older, she wanted nothing to do with them. This was before she was old enough to understand adoption at all.
Me: Do you remember any of this?
Grace: As a little kid, I remember reading the monkey book [a board book called Hug]. I remember crying every single time. Bobo [the monkey] lost his mama, and I did too.
Me: You eventually hated that book and would run away if I brought it out to read to your siblings. But also, you named your stuffed monkey Bobo. What are your earliest memories of understanding adoption?
Grace: I knew the word because we talked about it all the time. You never hid from us that we were adopted (not that you could!).
I think I first began to understand on the first day of kindergarten, because people came in with their parents, and all their parents looked like them, and my parents didn’t look like me. That’s when I realized that I wasn’t in a normal situation, that this didn’t happen to everybody.
What beauty is teaching me about finding hope and purpose
My first week of my first year away at college, I went to Target and bought decorations for my dorm room. I bought imitation ivy to pin to the walls and artificial flowers that matched my quilt. I probably spent about twenty dollars, and afterward I felt very guilty, which is probably the only reason I remember this inconsequential event.
My particular brand of youthful idealism centered around sacrifice. I had already wrestled greatly with the decision to spend the time and money to attend college when people were dying (literally and spiritually) all over the world. But I was an intensely practical young woman, so I was convinced by my parents’ argument that I would be more useful for the kingdom of God with a higher education.
However, decorations for my room? Totally superfluous. A child was starving to death in Sudan while I bought plastic ivy. Making my room beautiful felt excessive, extravagant, and therefore, selfish.
Though stewardship is still important to me, I had a lot to learn about beauty. Contrary to my youthful pragmatism, beauty is not purposeless. God created beauty; it reflects him, and my instinct to cultivate it is a part of his image in me.
Planting hope
I go to my garden in the evenings when my work is finished and the air is cool, and I am soul weary. The news of the day had crept out of dark corners like fire ants, biting, leaving welts: the bombings, the deportations, those starving children in Sudan. The heaviness of a friend with chronic illness or a husband who left, or my worries for my children, are like stubborn weeds that spring up unbidden, refusing to release, spreading, sucking up the life around them.
But then I notice tiny green filaments pushing up through dark soil, and with it comes an inexplicable surge of hope. Each successive day brings something new to see, to examine, and I water and watch as fragile stems metamorphose into poppies, gladiolas, daisies, black-eyed susans. The sunflowers stretch and peek over the fence. Lillies open their mouths and sing, faces to the sky. The hummingbirds and bees dance in a delighted frenzy of indecision. And suddenly I am no longer so heavy.
I dig my fingers in deep and pull out the weeds at the root, while somehow the exquisite detail of the purple larkspur seeps into my soul. As I force back what’s dead and lifeless to make room for Eden to flourish, suddenly the world doesn’t seem so dark.
The secret to finding human flourishing might not be what we imagined.
“Americans fight over food.”
Dorothy and Aishi sat in our living room in Tanzania, the summer after their freshman year of college in the States, eyes wide with incredulity. We had known these girls since they were ten years old, and though they were Tanzanian, they had grown up at our international school, so their accents and mannerisms could have passed them for American. Yet at heart, they had Tanzanian values, and their first foray into American culture made that very apparent.
“The girls in our dorm got into big fights over food,” they told us, appalled. “If you touched someone else’s food, it was a huge deal.”
As Tanzanians, they were bewildered by this. In Tanzania, all food, at all times, is for sharing. Hoarding or hiding a secret stash was completely unconscionable. In Tanzania, it’s rude to eat in front of someone else without offering to share it with anyone around you, even if it’s your own personal lunch.
Tanzanians share. Full stop.
Maybe that’s part of the reason new research shows they are happier than Americans. Apparently, it doesn’t matter that the average yearly income for a Tanzanian household is $2,000 and the average income for an American household is $80,000. Apparently, money doesn’t buy happiness. Which, of course, we already knew. But did we?
The Global Flourishing Study, “a groundbreaking five-year longitudinal study of over 200,000 adults across 22 countries” just published some astonishing data, some of which states that Tanzania, one of the world’s poorest countries, has a higher average composite flourishing score than many affluent countries such as the US, Sweden, Germany, and Japan.
