Author: Amy Medina Page 14 of 231

Selling Our Souls to Soccer?

Josiah came home to us at nine months old and found the ping pong balls on the second day. They were the perfect size for his tiny fists and he crawled around the house with one in each hand, clicking on the tile floors. 

His first word was daddy and his second word was ball and I’m not bitter about that at all of course.

All his favorite toys centered around soccer. On Sundays after church, we ate at P-Square and while we waited for our rice and beans and mishkaki (P-Square had the best mishkaki), he and his sisters would hunt around the plastic tables for bottle caps. Soon he had enough so that each kind was a soccer team – like, Fanta was Manchester United and Sprite was Liverpool. Gil made him a soccer field out of green pressboard and Josiah spent hours playing bottlecap soccer, arranging his “players” in perfect formation. 

Every year for his birthday, the only gift he wanted was the new version of the FIFA video game. So every fall, we figured out a way for somebody to bring us FIFA 2014 or 2015 or 2016 out to Tanzania. His parties were soccer themed for six years in a row. 

He mastered a diving header at three and a bicycle kick at four. He played soccer before school, at recess, and after school and usually came home with his lunch uneaten because he played then too. When I nagged him about eating lunch, he asked me to make him something he could shove down his throat in 30 seconds. 

In Tanzania, I loved that Josiah loved soccer and I loved watching him play. He joined the HOPAC team and had a couple of practices and a game each week. Maybe twice a year, he had a tournament on a Saturday. Often, Gil was his coach. On Sunday evenings, families would informally gather at HOPAC and play together – all ages. Soccer almost always happened at HOPAC so it flowed easily into our lives. 

Two years ago, we moved to America, and I started hating soccer. Josiah was quickly recruited for an AYSO club team, and we said yes because during the pandemic, we were eager to help him make connections. And thus, the full force of what it means to have a kid play club soccer crashed down on me, with evening practices and games almost every weekend – year-round.

I threw several little hissy fits last year. I seethed against the hurried family dinners and the lack of free time on weekends. I mourned our busyness and inability to spend more time in ministry. But then I looked around and other families didn’t seem fazed by this. Driving an hour to a tournament every Saturday was apparently normal life for American parents. I experienced serious culture shock. 

Gil and I have never had aspirations for our kids to go far in sports. We don’t have lofty goals for college; we drive past the community college five minutes from our house and cheerfully announce, “Hey kids, wave hello to your future college!” I rail against this American culture that tells me I must push my children to reach their potential in every area, that success in school and sports or arts is the ultimate goal of parenting. 

Josiah always said he wanted to be a professional soccer player when he grew up. And I would always smile condescendingly and say, “That’s a nice dream, Buddy, but it’s not going to happen. Choose something else.” This was usually followed by, “Get off your backside and do your homework.”

Unfortunately for me, this summer the coach of an elite team invited Josiah to be a starter on his team. He told us that Josiah could likely play for a Division I college. And possibly become a professional player.

My Body, My Choice: The Argument of Autonomy

My mom always told me that my first full sentence was (with all the attitude a two-year-old can muster), “I can do it myself!”

You could say that the rest of my life has been one big lesson in precisely the opposite: I cannot, actually, do it myself.

Sometimes I can’t even keep a grip on reality. There are times in extreme anxiety when I’ve told Gil or a friend, “When I feel this way, you need to tell me this truth.” Without other people, I wonder if I would even be sane.

Children raised with minimal human interaction are underdeveloped mentally, socially, emotionally. Our very existence is dependent on others. 

So isn’t it ironic that in America, we idolize autonomy? Americans love choices. Whether it’s frozen yogurt toppings, owning a gun, getting a vaccine, wearing a mask, or determining your gender, we champion individual decisions. Follow your heart. You be you. Your body, your choice. 

Independence is such a part of the air we breathe that we might not realize that it’s not a universal value. 

Did you know that when compared with other countries, the “Individualism” score for the United States ranks the highest in the entire world? Autonomy is not a universal value. With few exceptions, every country in the world values connection to family and society more than we do.

I asked a friend from Europe what he found unexpected about American culture. He said, “Going into a sandwich shop and choosing your own toppings.” In Europe, they choose the toppings for you. But here, you can have it your way. 

In America, we hand babies a spoon at six months old. We praise the three-year-old who puts on his shoes. “You’re such a big girl!” is the ultimate toddler compliment. But I’ve met Tanzanian mamas who still breastfeed at three and Indian mamas who are still spoon-feeding their four-year-olds. They are in no hurry for their children to gain independence.

Autonomy is not a universal value. So should we step back and evaluate it?

When the Story Doesn’t Have a Happy Ending

We’d been on the mission field only six months, and we were already experiencing every missionary’s dream story: a Muslim convert. We participated in his baptism, guided his discipleship, and supported him through persecution. We had so much to write home about.

It all started when Gil and I—both just 24 years old—moved to a large city in Tanzania in 2001. We lived in the heart of the Indian section of the city, serving a subgroup from Southeast Asia who had flourished there for generations. We lived in a tiny, 600-square-foot, concrete block house, and all day long we could hear ripe fruit from our giant mango tree slam onto our tin roof. 

Right outside the gate of our compound, a dusty road hosted small fruit stands, a butcher shop, and taxis that bumped through the potholes. Just down the street, a Muslim school educated hundreds of young Indian boys. Soon after we arrived, the school asked Gil to coach volleyball, and that’s how we first met the young man I’ll call Abbas. 

Abbas was 19—only a few years younger than we were. We joined an Indian church plant, and when Gil started inviting the boys on his volleyball team to the youth group, Abbas jumped right in. Gil and Abbas quickly became fast friends. It wasn’t long until Abbas spent nearly every afternoon at our little house—playing chess or volleyball and arguing with Gil over soccer teams.

Abbas got used to my American cooking and developed a special affinity for cheese. I can still remember him imploring me daily, “Hey, Amy, do you have any cheeeeese?” He’d also scold me for throwing away the chicken neck because “that was the best part.”

He had eyes that danced and an infectious smile. During the regular greeting time at church, he’d make us all laugh by personally greeting every person in the room. He was smart, he was a jokester, and he was hungry to know about Jesus.

Abbas began meeting with Gil twice a week to study the Bible. We didn’t want to pressure him, so we let him set the time and determine the length of study. “How many weeks do you want to meet?” Gil asked. “Until I understand,” was Abbas’s reply.

Read the rest here in the Christianity Today Globe Issue.

We’d absorbed the unwritten rule in missions: Failure is unacceptable. I’d grown up immersed in missions culture, yet I couldn’t remember a single time that a missionary story, presentation, or newsletter ever included failure.

Send Their Letters Back

How does a 13-year-old girl process the destruction of the home she loves? In 8th grade, I watched helplessly from a distance as I heard reports of civil war destroying Liberia, the country that defined my childhood.

My expectation of returning to Liberia for my high school years slowly evaporated over the spring of 1990. As our mission organization scrambled to find a new assignment for us, my life skewed off in a direction that felt darker, unsteady, unsure. 

I worked through that grief over many years, but recently an unexpected gift from Beth, a long-ago friend, helped me more clearly process it. This missionary-kid friend from my years in Liberia wrote to tell me that she had found the letters I had written her during our 8th grade year. Would I like them back? 

Not long after, the packet arrived in the mail, and my girls studied my letters with fascination. What are these? they wondered, as if looking at ancient relics. There was a time before the internet, I told them with exasperation. People used paper. 

To be honest, I didn’t expect to find much value in my letters. So I was surprised by how meaningful it was to read them again. 

Interspersed in the drivel about vacations and teachers were windows into my inner life. I see the “between two worlds” struggle I was experiencing, common for third-culture kids, but not something I could keenly express until I was much older. 

We also get to go to Great America, a huge roller coaster park. Another good thing about this school is we get electives. I am taking handbells and drama. They are really fun. But I would give all this up for the beach, you, Carolyn, Feme, and the rest of our class.

And then there are the parts about the upheaval descending on our lives.

Tell me what happened in the coo! (or however you spell it). I hope it’s over by the time you get this letter. Has it rained a lot this year? How is ELWA? How was your Christmas vacation? We went to Disneyland!

Coups aren’t supposed to be in the experience of 13-year-olds, which explains why I couldn’t spell it, and why it’s in the same paragraph about the weather and Disneyland. 

The coup turned into a civil war. It wasn’t over by the time Beth got this letter. In fact, it wasn’t over for another 15 years. 

Everywhere to Everywhere: One story of how God is reshaping the global mission field

In my job as a global missions coach, I get to meet all kinds of fascinating people. But David and Karla’s story stands out as one of the most extraordinary I’ve come across.

When I was interviewing Karla for this piece, she told me, “I love how God crashed our stories.” Indeed. This story links together several of our friends from college (Kathy Keller, Joshua and Naomi Smith, and Gil and I). It’s a story of death and redemption, supernatural connections, and the beauty of surrendered lives.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

——————————————————————————————

“Today, the Majority World Church sends out as many cross-cultural missionaries as does the Western Church. Mission activity is no longer predominantly a West-to-East activity. We must now see mission not as one place to the rest of the world, but as everywhere to everywhere.” (Jason Mandryk, Missions Analyst)  

David and Karla Sarmiento become emotional when they talk about the deaths of their baby girls. In 2014, Sarah died at three months old in a tragic accident. A year later, Jemimah died from a heart defect the week after she was born.  

Yet with tears in their eyes, David and Karla are quick to say, “From our pain to His glory.” Though excruciating, they recognize that their pain brought them deeper into Christ, made them fall in love with His Church and is now taking them from their home in Mexico City to build God’s kingdom in Paris. 

The Sarmientos married in 2013 in their native Mexico, ideal complements for each other: David is gentle, soft-spoken and contemplative; Karla is vivacious, outgoing and artistic. In their early years together, David worked as an architect and Karla as a jazz musician. A year after they married, Karla was pregnant with Sarah. They opened a tea house in the Roma neighborhood – an area of Mexico City known for its European architecture, used bookstores and young professionals.  

ReachGlobal missionary Sam Loesch discovered the Sarmiento’s tea shop, Casa Tassel, not long after it opened. Delighted, she wrote on her blog, “I found the place; my place. A cozy tea house just a couple blocks away. They have a shimmery, gold menu with 54 types of tea, tall shelves filled with mismatched teapots and cups, treats displayed across the counter, and a few inviting seats resting atop worn wood floors.”[T]hey realized that their tea shop wasn’t just a business – it was ministry.

Right around this time, baby Sarah languished in a coma. In a hospital waiting room, David stumbled upon Sam’s blog post and reached out to Sam. She introduced them to her ReachGlobal co-workers, Joshua and Naomi Smith, just a few weeks after Sarah’s death, when the bottom had fallen out of David and Karla’s world. 

Go here to read the rest at the EFCA blog.

Page 14 of 231

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén

Verified by MonsterInsights