My mom sits at her mom’s breakfast table, wailing and pleading. My grandmother sits opposite her, wailing and angry.
It is one of my earliest memories.
I’d never heard so much emotion out of either of them, and the sunny little room encircled by cabinets of glassware suddenly felt tense, alarming, to my five-year-old soul.
My Gram struggled to accept that we were moving to Africa, so that day at her table was one of many tense conversations. In her anger that my mom was taking away her grandchildren, Gram even consulted a lawyer to see if she could sue for custody.
During our first two-year term in Liberia, we faithfully sent her letters and pictures. My mom tape-recorded my brother’s and my voices and mailed the cassettes off too. Gram didn’t call once during the entire two years. She didn’t send a single letter. Her anger and grief consumed her.
My grandmother never understood my parents’ love for Jesus, so their motivation to become missionaries didn’t make sense to her either. But unfortunately, her response wasn’t all that different from many parents who do share their children’s faith.
In Mobilizing Gen Z, Jolene Erlacher and Katy Whitequote the Future of Missions study from Barna: “Only 35 percent of engaged Christian parents of young adults say they would definitely encourage their child to serve in missions, while 25 percent are not open to the idea at all.”
They continue, “Career success and physical safety are the top concerns. Nearly half said, ‘I’d rather my child get a well-paying job than be a career missionary.’”
This piece assumes you are familiar with the story of Renee Bach, which was recently depicted in the documentary Savior Complex on HBO, but also in the 2020 podcast series called The Missionary.
I have a lot of sympathy for Renee Bach because I could have been her.
I remember questioning whether a college education was worth the price when so many in Africa urgently needed that money and my help. If I had gotten the notion in my idealistic head that it was possible to go to Africa at age 19 and start a charity, I might have jumped on the next plane.
Did Renee Bach have a Savior Complex? Absolutely. So did I. So do a lot of young people. It might not be about missions for all of them – it might be climate change or racial reconciliation or anti-sex trafficking or gender equality or whatever is the current hot-button topic – but young people are known for their passion and idealism. Renee’s intentions were noble, and she helped to save babies’ lives. Isn’t this a good thing? It sure is a lot more inspiring than playing video games in the basement.
But young people don’t know what they don’t know, and this is what the adults in their lives need to help them see. So when I consider Renee’s story, that’s the part that strikes me as the avoidable tragedy.
I’m not sure what was in the water in Jinja, Uganda, that caused dozens of young American women to zip over and start charities all by themselves. (We never saw this trend in Tanzania.) Renee moved to Uganda the same year that Katie Davis published her New York Times bestseller Kisses from Katie about doing the exact thing. Katie was the darling of the evangelical world that year, so why would Renee question if this was a wise move?
Last week, I noticed a verse I underlined 25 years ago – Psalm 139:10. Next to it, I had written “FCC membership 9/97.”
I paused for a few minutes and sat in that memory.
It was my senior year at college, my second year away from home, and Faith Community Church (FCC) quickly became my community. The Sunday night college group at Lance and Suzanne’s became my second home, and I spent my Wednesday nights as an Awana leader for 5th grade girls.
It was Awana that led to my “crisis.” About a year after I started attending FCC, the elders decided that anyone who volunteered in the children’s ministry needed to be a member of the church. This made sense, of course – goodness knows, children’s workers need to be kept accountable, and FCC was ahead of its time.
I couldn’t imagine my life without children’s ministry, especially Awana, as I had been a leader since 8th grade. But in my 20-year-old mind, becoming a member of FCC was out of the question. I felt an unswerving loyalty to the church I had grown up in in San Jose, and I planned to move back there as soon as I had my teaching credential the following year. Attending FCC was just a blip in the history of my life, so how could I take the weighty step of becoming a member?
This felt like a huge dilemma, so much so that I resonated with a Scripture passage about God’s presence in making my bed in the depths. So much of a quandary that I did the very scary and intimidating thing of scheduling a meeting with the children’s pastor. Pastor Jeff was the complete opposite of scary and intimidating, but still – doing a grown-up thing is terrifying when you are 20.
I’m currently in Minnesota for ReachGlobal training and interviews, and I’m enjoying the gorgeous fall colors that can’t be matched in Southern California.
Here are some articles and books from the last month that I recommend:
“This spending is largely recession resistant, and continues during tough economic, political and social climates. Wood says spending on ritual artifacts, such as costumes, is “fairly price insensitive”; consumers will continue to shop, even if times are bad.”
“If Newsom signs the YIGBY bill into law, churches wouldn’t have to go through this drawn-out process. The law gives churches the right to build low-income housing…’It clears a pathway for churches to know, with certainty, that they can build housing on their property.'”
Most people don’t realize that colonialism in Africa is still happening — but in this century, from China and Russia. We saw this firsthand in Tanzania.
“Beijing has become Africa’s largest creditor with total borrowing at around $160 billion. The terms of these loans are not publicly available, but some analysts believe Beijing will insist on being paid in full. That’s not good for Africa, and it might not be good for global democratic interests if China uses that debt as a bargaining chip.”
This is such a cool story! “All the way back in the early 1980s, Joni ministered to my grandmother after the loss of her daughter. Forty years later, she ministered to me after the loss of my son.”
“The fastest growing metro area in the United States is called The Villages. It’s a retirement community that takes up eighty square miles of central Florida and is home to one hundred and forty thousand people. It contains nine state-of-the-art hospitals, a dozen sprawling shopping centres, over one hundred bars and restaurants, and more than fifty golf courses.
Retirement is certainly big business. The US has a total GDP of twenty-three trillion dollars, but the assets of all American pension funds are nearly fifty percent larger, making them easily the biggest players in the financial markets. In the words of journalist Sam Kriss, ‘mass consumer pensions have turned our entire adulthood into a preamble to old age. You work for three, four, five decades—all so you can enjoy those few, brief, useless years between retirement and death’. He goes as far as to say that ‘the entire global economy is now a machine for producing satisfied retirees’.
The Villages attempts to sell people the thing they have been working for all their lives – perfect leisure before they die. Sounds ideal? Kriss visited the Villages and says that it’s the worst place he’s ever been to.”
I referenced You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and How That’s Good News by Kelly Kapic in my previous post. His book not only challenged my perfectionism, but also my desire for independence. I also really appreciated what he had to say about identity — especially since I’m trying hard to help my transracially adopted kids figure this out. It’s an excellent, thought-provoking book on a subject I’ve never heard explored before.
And pictures from this month…
Gil took Grace’s senior pictures this month. Here’s a couple fun ones of my wonderful girl!
It was a morning straight out of my nightmares: Fourth grade, and I arrived at school to see all my classmates carrying posterboards or shoeboxes. Adrenaline shot through me and landed in a pit of dread at the bottom of my stomach. That nutrition project: I had forgotten all about it. My hands suddenly felt extraordinarily empty.
I turned in the project the next day, and when my teacher returned it, the bright red “B” glared at me. Even worse, she had scrawled the mark of shame across the top: “LATE.” She might as well have written “FAILURE.” The mortification seared itself into my memory.
I berated myself for this lapse in responsibility. How could I have been so stupid? I prided myself on being an excellent student, and excellent students didn’t forget to do projects.
There is more than one kind of perfectionist in this world. Some want everything done perfectly; others, like me, want it done right. For this reason, I loved report cards. In tangible form, there was a black-and-white evaluation of how I measured up. I knew exactly where I stood.
Later seasons of life didn’t afford me such clarity. How could I know, really know, that I was parenting right? And when differing opinions on schooling or discipline gave me different definitions of what was right, this caused me great consternation. Please, someone, tell me the right thing to do, and I’ll do it.
Without an objective evaluation, I made myself my own mental report card. I will pack my children a healthy lunch every day. I will wash the towels on Mondays. I will water the houseplants on Sundays. I will schedule dentist appointments for everyone every six months. I am a success if I do these things; I am a failure if I don’t.
