Raising you has been one of the greatest privileges of my life.
From the first day I laid eyes on you and you gave me your radiant smile, you have been sunshine in my life. Happy and fearless—that’s the way I would describe you from the time you were a baby. You sang “Amazing Grace” to an entire school full of kids when you were just two years old. Dad taught you to do backflips into the pool when you were three. You are always ready to jump into the next adventure with both feet.
But one of the most special things about you is your love for people. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone more people-oriented than you. When you were a toddler, I remember showing you the HOPAC school yearbook and being flabbergasted by how many names you knew of students and staff. As you grew up, whenever you met a new friend, you would always run into the kitchen and grandly announce, “I love [this person!] and I love her mom too!” I don’t know if you’ve ever met a person you didn’t like. God gave you the gift of loving others enthusiastically. 😊
It’s that time of year when school is at its craziest! Maybe you’ve got a moment or two to read some good stuff. Here are my recommendations from this month.
I love asking people good questions, and this is one I hadn’t thought of before. “When I ask others why they do what they do, I’m often blessed to hear them describe their love for things I’ve never considered lovable: crafting beautiful smiles from misaligned teeth, bringing order from numerical chaos, instructing children in the basic skills of life. As I listen and ask follow-up questions, I learn—I learn to appreciate what I have often never considered before and even what doesn’t especially enthuse me.”
I used to be an enthusiastic teacher of how human adoption mirrors God’s adoption of us. As I’ve raised my children and come to know the complexity of their experience, I am much more careful to say this. This article by an adoptee explains it well. “We look at the Bible’s picture of God adopting us and are grateful. Adoption as a theological truth is glorious. But we ought to be careful to not overplay the parallel with human adoption. There are important, inglorious differences that hinge on the experience of the adoptee.”
This book was already on my list to read, but after reading this article, it’s moved higher on the list!
“After the test was finished, most of these students agreed that they’d checked over 90% of the above statements.
Then I unveiled the big shocker (spoiler ahead!) from Wilson’s chapter: every single one of these statements would NOT have been true for almost everyone before 1776.
So, I told them, “You’re WEIRDER. You’re Western, Educated, Industrialized, Democratic, Ex-Christian and Romantic. And that means your thoughts, assumptions, values and experiences are far more culturally specific than you realize.”
I wish this wasn’t as radical as it feels in America, because really, radical hospitality is the way we were created to live. This engaging book left me encouraged and inspired.
Our Home Group went on a weekend retreat together…we rented the biggest AirBnb we could find for the cheapest price we could find…which meant we ended up out in the middle of nowhere. But it was awesome!
For the past few years, my health hasn’t been great. I’ve had a lot of pain and not a lot of energy, a lot of the time. Sometimes it felt like my legs had 50-pound weights on them, walking up the stairs. I often had to consciously push myself to do what I needed to do.
Then, in December, I received surgery that made all this go away. I’ve felt back to my old self again. I’ve felt years younger.
But what astonishes me is how quickly I have forgotten this. There are days when not one memory of how I used to feel crosses my mind. I forget to be grateful that my health issues had a solution, unlike so many who don’t. I forget to be grateful that I have health at all, unlike some who have never had it.
Much to my astonishment, this article has received over 11,000 views on A Life Overseas. If you would like to share it, please use the original link.
You’ve got plans to hold a VBS this summer in a cross-cultural or overseas context, and you’re feeling the challenges: How do you communicate effectively with kids who don’t speak English? How do you come up with activities that you can fit into a suitcase? Maybe you’ve got a limited budget or time constraints. Yet you have a sincere desire for your team to share Jesus during your trip.
So maybe you are considering the classic go-to activity for sharing the gospel with kids from a different culture or language: the simple wordless bracelet.
You can order 12 kits for $5.99. They’re fun, they’re cute, and kids love them. Plus, the children now have a tangible reminder of the gospel, right there on their wrists, no language skills required. Perfect.
Maybe not so perfect. Sometimes cross-cultural communication is a lot more complicated than just a language barrier. This classic VBS activity might not be communicating what you think.
Before you put wordless bracelets into your cross-cultural VBS curriculum, take a moment to consider the following thoughts.
Many cultures in Asia, Africa, and South America have strong beliefs in the spirit world. In order to protect their children against evil spirits, they will often tie an amulet around their wrists. This will be a cloth, twine, or leather cord and may include a few beads.
So when a group of religious foreigners arrive in their country and put on a children’s program and start tying bracelets around the kids’ wrists that have spiritual meaning…..
Unfortunately, you may have just given those kids a new amulet.
Languages divide up colors differently. For example, in English, we have a word for red and a word for pink (not light red!). But we say light blue and dark blue. Other languages might use the same word for blue/green or red/orange. And when a person doesn’t have a word for different colors, he might not see them as different. This is fascinating stuff – and something we need to be aware of.
Other cultures assign different meanings to colors than we do. We may see green as representing growth. But in Indonesia, it’s associated with exorcism. In China, it can be associated with infidelity, and in South America it’s connected with death. White is correlated with purity in Western cultures, but in some Asian cultures, it’s a symbol of death. The children in your host culture may not understand the gospel story the way you intend to tell it if they are not making the same color associations.
Contemplate for a moment the implications of a missions team with lighter skin visiting a group of people with darker skin and telling them that black means sin and white means holiness.
The gospel presentation that goes along with wordless bracelets is grounded in a guilt/innocence paradigm, which may not be the best way for the message to make sense to the people you are trying to reach. If you are unfamiliar with what I am talking about here, check out this excellent 7 minute video on guilt/innocence, honor/shame, and fear/power worldviews.
I realize that this list might make you feel a little uncertain about not just wordless bracelets but your entire VBS program. Because if something as simple as a colorful craft might be communicating something different than what you intended, then what does that mean about all of your other activities? So if you are feeling that tension, great! That’s a good place to be. That’s where learning and growth start.
So what should you do?
Start with some research. In the time you have available, your team needs to learn all they can about the history, customs, worldviews, and religion of the people you will be visiting. Hofstede Insights is a great resource for this. Remember–don’t assume that what works in your own country will automatically translate to another culture.
Most importantly, before you set any plans in stone, run your entire program–teaching, activities, games, songs–past your missionary or local contact. Make it very clear that you want feedback and are open to change. Even better—if there is any way that a local person can do the teaching instead of someone on your team, make that happen! The best way for you to impact a community is to train others to do the program alongside you and then later—without you.
For more reading about short-term missions, check out these links:
Also, this excellent video series Helping Without Hurting in Short-Term Missions by the Chalmers Institute is extremely valuable for any church or organization that wants to prioritize short-term missions.
I loved telling this story–one of my favorites from our years in Tanzania.
One of the first things that stood out to Peter and Eunice when they visited Reach Tanzania Bible School was that the teachers drank out of the same plastic cups as the students. In their denomination, the leadership would remain distant from those under them. Visiting guest pastors would choose the best hotels and restaurants. And certainly, they wouldn’t socialize with their students.
But they knew they had found a unique Bible school in Tanzania when they heard the philosophy of the director, Mark Dunker, a ReachGlobal missionary. “If you are looking for a paper to hang on your wall, this is not the right place for you,” Mark told them. “Here we teach for life change.”
Peter and Eunice were instantly hooked—this was the place they had been looking for. They didn’t realize their lives were about to change far more than they could have ever imagined.
By the time Peter and Eunice stepped into Reach Tanzania Bible School in early 2017, they had already been full-time pastors and missionaries for 20 years. Originally from Kenya, they had joined their denomination (founded by American missionaries) as young adults with a sincere desire to serve God wholeheartedly. They received some mentoring and then were sent to locations all over East Africa, evangelizing, pastoring churches and discipling others.
They were shining stars in their large international denomination, faithful to teach the truth about how to be born again from Acts 2:36-38: Repent and be baptized. Peter explained that repentance meant regularly making lists of your sins, publicly confessing, and often being publicly rebuked and humiliated in front of the church. Once you’d cleaned up your life enough, you were ready to be baptized—and you weren’t saved until that moment. And even once you had been baptized, you lived in daily fear that you might mess up too much to keep your salvation.
Like Cornelius or Apollos, Peter and Eunice feared God, earnest in their pursuit of Him. Before being assigned to his denomination’s church in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Peter took classes at a Pentecostal seminary. He agreed to go to Tanzania in 2013 with permission from his leadership that he continue to pursue Bible education, but theological education is sparse in Tanzania. So in 2017, when Eunice saw a Facebook ad for Reach Tanzania pop up in her feed and noticed it was not far from their home, they decided to check it out.
They quickly signed up and started classes shortly after, but Eunice was disappointed to see that the first required course was on Bible study methods. “I have already been studying the Bible for 20 years,” she thought. “What else are they going to teach me?”
She was about to get the shock of her life. The first of many.
