Author: Amy Medina Page 62 of 235

We Americans Are Far Too Easily Pleased

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On May 10, 2017

In American Worldview

I am a cheating American. I don’t deserve your sympathy.

When we’re in the States, Gil and I often comment at how much easier it is to live the Christian life when we are overseas.  There’s something about being outside of our own culture that takes away much of the temptation to acquire more, to be more, and to over-indulge.  You have no idea
what a blessed relief it is to be free from the constant barrage of television commercials, billboards, and the incessant push to buy more, more, more.  There is something incredibly humbling in forging deep friendships with people who (materially) have so much less than we do, yet have relentless faith.  And the times when we do go without electricity or safety or convenience have taught us much about contentment and perseverance.  I wouldn’t trade that for anything. 

But even if I have had the benefit of living a good portion of my life in a different country, at the end of the day, I still am American.  Sure, I can reap the advantages of learning and growing from other cultures, but I still have my blue passport and my health insurance and my 18 pieces of luggage that I will lug back to Tanzania.  Yep, 18 pieces, people.  Sure, I can tell you that a lot of it is for HOPAC and other ministry purposes, but that’s still 900 pounds of Americanism that I will carry over the ocean.  No, don’t elevate me for what I have given up.  I am a cheater.  I get the best of both worlds.

packing at the end of our home assignment in 2014

I have a love-hate relationship with America. I love all that’s good—all that I see that
sets America apart from so many countries in the world—but yet I hate what it
breeds. I love Costco, but then I read
that America has over 3 million self-storage units at 58,000 facilities. I love Target, but then I
remember that the markets of Dar es Salaam are bursting with hundreds of tons
of America’s cast-off clothes. Americans have 44 billion dollars sitting around in unused gift cards. (The entire GDP of Tanzania is $45 billion).  But what do we buy
our friends who have everything? Gift
cards.

American cast-offs

Why is it that we Americans can have so much—and yet so
often take all those gifts and throw them down the toilet?

Freedom leads to debauchery.

Prosperity morphs into greed.

Beauty turns into idolatry.

Convenience feeds laziness.

Opportunity transforms into pride.

Abundance becomes addiction.

Gil and I keep having the same conversation these days:  How does an American truly live the Christian life?  What should that look like?  When the temptation of excess is not only close by, but encouraged and celebrated?

When even good things, like food and sports and entertainment are so
close to our fingertips at every hour of the day that it becomes practically
impossible to turn them down?  When binging is no longer only associated with just food or alcohol, but also entertainment?  How do we enjoy the good
gifts God has given us, like prosperity, opportunity, and beauty, yet keep
those things from turning into greed and idolatry?  The line is so incredibly thin and so difficult to determine.  Sure, it’s easy to say, “American Christians are too materialistic,” but then when it comes down to deciding how much is too much, who knows the answer?

There’s got to be a way, isn’t there?  Can we find a way to take advantage of our prosperity, of our abundance and comfort and convenience, and yet use it for the glory of God?  Can we enjoy the gifts God has given us, and yet still live a life of self-denial?  Can we allow the beauty of America to sink into our souls and make us better people, yet steadfastly refuse to be satisfied in anything but Jesus?

I don’t know the answer, but I know it starts by asking the questions.  Every single day.  And not allowing ourselves to be truly dazzled by anything except the cross of Christ.

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. (C.S. Lewis)

 

Medina Life, April 2017

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On May 2, 2017

In Other

Easter Sunday

Believe it or not, there are four generations in this picture:  Babies, Mom, Grandfather, and Great-Grandmother.  
Three-legged cousins
Brotherly love part 1
A Medina tradition:  Street Wiffle Ball
Brotherly love part 2 (tagging him out)
All dressed up and freezing in our pretty Easter clothes
Auntie and nephew
winning the balloon toss

Brotherly love part 3
Cousin bonding
The whole gang….four generations.
Lots o’ cousins

Legoland

Driving this car may have been the pinnacle of his entire life thus far.

Dodger Stadium

In the Dodger dugout during a pre-game tour

with Grandpa at the new Jackie Robinson memorial
His first MLB game

California Poppy Fields 

Then up to my hometown of San Jose…

Children’s Discovery Museum

That right there is my very own niece.
And this amazingness is my nephew.
And just for fun, this was my own little guy 7 years ago, at the same location and the same age then as his cousin is now.  Apparently two-year-old boys are all pretty excited by this exhibit.
And this is my favorite little brother.
Who also happens to be a pretty incredible Dad.

Girls’ Day 

My aunt spoiled all us girls with lunch and pedicures and ice cream!

Giants’ Game

My Dad took Gil and the boys to a Giants’ Game.  I think my boys’ grandfathers are doing their best to confuse their poor grandsons by each supporting one of the two greatest rival teams in California.

And in between all this, we are doing things like homeschooling and preaching and making presentations and driving a lot and hugging a lot of people.  It’s overwhelming and wonderful and we are all enjoying ourselves immensely.

Six Privileges of Living in a Wealthy Country

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On April 21, 2017

In Other

Some benefits to living in a wealthy country are obvious:  Access to clean water, free schools, plenty of available food, non-stop electricity.  But it wasn’t until I had lived in a developing country for a number of years that I started seeing the more subtle privileges.  

1.      The privilege
of choosing your career.  What do you want to be when you grow up?  is a standard question for children.  We encourage our children to dream big, to
set goals, to reach for the stars.  We
take personality tests and analyze our strengths.  Yet for most of the world, this is never even
a consideration.  For most, a job isn’t about
personal fulfillment, it’s a way to survive. 
That means you take any job you can get, whether it’s digging ditches or
selling boxes of Kleenex on the side of the road.  And working in fast food?  That’s one of the better careers out
there. 

2.      The privilege
of reasonable commute time.  I’m currently visiting Los Angeles, which has the worst commute time in the United States.  But compared to the rest of the world?  It ranks 12th.  Out of the 50 cities worldwide with the worst commute times, America has only three. We also must consider that for most people in the world, getting to work isn’t in a private, air conditioned car with leather seats.  Imagine an hour or two–each direction–standing in a packed bus or train.  Every day.

3.      The
privilege of protecting your children. 
Every morning, I have watched children as young as four or five years old walking a mile to school along busy roads with no sidewalks.  Do their parents worry?  They certainly told me they do.  But since parents have their own hour-plus
commute every morning, and they can’t afford school bus fare, they don’t have
much of a choice. 

4.      The
privilege of seeing your children reach their potential.  Sports teams, music and art lessons, even
educational toys are all at our children’s fingertips.  Learning to read and write is an assumption,
and if we discover a particular talent in a child, we nurture it.  But in the majority of the world, this
doesn’t happen.  Children are often crowded
into classrooms of 50 or even 100, and books or other resources are scarce or
non-existent.  How many potential
Olympians, musical prodigies, or brilliant scientists are languishing in
developing countries, with no opportunity to develop their potential?

5.      The
privilege of food choices. 
Eliminating gluten, dairy, grains, peanuts, and meat, or switching to
organic food has become a popular way of improving health in western society.  But what you may not realize is that this is
a distinct privilege of living in a wealthy country.  Even in countries where food is not scarce, choice
is not an option.  Pesticides are a cheap
and easy way to increase crop production and are rarely regulated.  And in many countries, eliminating grains or
carbs means there would be hardly anything left to eat. 

6.      The
privilege of knowing why people die. 
Of course, having some of the best health care in the world means that in
wealthy countries, a lot less people die in the first place.  But when they do, at least we know why.  I can think of countless incidences in
East Africa of babies, children, or adults dying—sometimes falling over dead
after a short illness—and no one has any idea why.  Cancer? 
Heart attack?  Diabetes?  Maybe. 
Maybe not.  They will never
know. 

Of course, not every person in a wealthy country has all these privileges, and not every person in a developing country does not.  And there’s always people like me, who get the benefits of being from a wealthy country, even while living in a developing one.  The life I take for granted is not a reality for billions of people.  And coming to grips with my privileges has helped me to be more grateful, more content, and more eager to wisely use what I have been given. 

God Does Not Accept Me For Who I Am

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On April 14, 2017

In What I'm Learning

God does not accept me for who I am

Our culture is obsessed with acceptance.  Have you noticed this?

Believe in yourself.  Be yourself.  Come as you are.  Accept people for who they are.  Don’t judge.  I felt judged.  I promise I won’t judge you.  I promise I wasn’t judging you.  Love yourself.  Don’t ever change.  Treat others the way they want to be treated.  

And perhaps you’ve even heard this one:  God accepts you for who you are.  Unconditionally.

That is a lie.  And if you believe it, it comes straight from your culture, not from your Bible.

God does not accept us for who we are.  He never has.  He cannot.  He literally cannot go against His perfect and holy nature and accept us for who we are.  In fact, the Bible says that we are enemies of God.  That we are children of Satan.  That we are at war with God.  That He despises our sin.

That is not acceptance.

But here is the hope:  While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Acceptance, no.  But love, yes.

The problem is that our society simply refuses to acknowledge the fact that we all are wretched sinners.  It’s ridiculous, really, because we watch the news at night and we discipline the children who are clawing each other’s eyes out and we shame the bullies and we are horrified at the racism and the raping and the riots, but then we think the answer to all of this is simply to…..accept one another?  Really?  Yet we do everything we can to tell ourselves that we’re really not all that bad, that we just need to build our self-esteem and get rid of the toxic people in our lives and practice better self-care, and then our lives will be grand.

Oh, I get it.  We’re all good people, deep down.  Sometimes really deep down.  At least I am, right? After all, I wouldn’t have been one of the millions of Germans who stood by and watched the ashes of six million Jews fall on my head.  It wouldn’t have been me who picked up a machete and murdered one million neighbors in Rwanda.

Seems to me that the deeper you go, the less goodness you find–not more.

It’s true that as a human made in the image of God, I am infinitely valuable.  But I have never been worthy of acceptance.  I am arrogant and selfish.  My patience level is directly connected to sleep and food and air temperature.  My heart is not naturally inclined to worship God.  Perhaps if God was a good-natured grandpa, partially blind and deaf, then he could find it in his heart to accept me.  But who would want to worship that kind of God anyway?

Jesus Christ died on the cross because God does not accept me.  It’s like the parent who loves his drug-addicted son so much that he cashes in his pension and sells his house to pay for his treatment.  That’s not acceptance; because what parent willingly accepts his child’s addiction?  But that is love.  Amazing love.  Sacrificial love.  Unconditional love.  Never-stopping, never-giving-up love.  But not acceptance.  We cannot confuse the two.

I cannot understand the cross until I understand that my sin is the reason it cost so much.  I cannot understand that cost until I come face-to-face with the truth that I Am Not Acceptable.  But He became Acceptable for me.  I was not acceptable, and yet I am loved in a way that is far beyond what I can ever understand.  And the more I understand my wretchedness, the deeper I understand His love.

I am now acceptable to God.  Not because of who I am, but because of what He has done.

The new morality in our culture bears the disguise of goodness.  Don’t we want people to just feel good about themselves?  Except that when we do that, we lie to ourselves.  We lie to our friends.  We lie to our children.  Often we make our sin worse because we refuse to deal with it–or even acknowledge it.  And certainly, we lose the power of the cross.  And that is a tragedy indeed.

“Till sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet.” (Thomas Watson)

Related: Astonishingly Crazy

Transitioning

By

On April 12, 2017

In Other

It took less than 24 hours in America for me to feel like a complete idiot.

We arrived in California on Monday afternoon, and on Tuesday morning we headed to Target.  Because isn’t Target the reason we visit America?

The checker took my items and I swiped my credit card, proud of myself for remembering how to swipe a credit card.

“Oh, that’s a chip card,” the checker said.  “You need to put it in the bottom of the machine.”

I looked frantically for another place to stick my card.  I jammed it into the slot at the bottom of the machine and pulled it out.

“No,” the checker persisted.  “You have to leave it in there.”

Now I was totally flustered.  I stuck the card back in and accidentally pressed “cancel.”

Patiently, the checker (who was by now most certainly questioning my intelligence level), asked me to start over.

As I grabbed my things, I muttered, “So sorry….I’ve been living overseas for a long time…..”

Later that day, we went to the grocery store, and as I expertly stuck my chip card into the machine, signed it, and smiled confidently, I heard imaginary applause in my ears.  I had conquered.

Okay, people.  What else have I missed in the last three years?  Help a girl out here.

I always marvel during these transitions.  It just doesn’t seem possible that I can get on a plane for 24 hours and end up on a different planet as a different person in a different dimension.  That’s what it feels like.  And not only does my body think it’s still in Tanzania (as evidenced by intense jetlag), but my brain can’t keep up either.  I can’t remember what side of the car to get into.  I can’t remember where the bathroom light switch is, since it’s supposed to be outside the door–right?.  And if someone turns the lights out, I assume it’s a power cut.

My first-week thoughts are always convoluted and strange.  It doesn’t take long for me to adapt again to America and everything becomes routine.  But those few days at the beginning are particularly amusing.  So here you go:

The air feels awesome.  I noticed this immediately as we exited the airport.  Awesome, I tell you.  It’s like I had been living under a wet blanket for three years, and someone just pulled it off my head.  I have not sweat once since leaving Dar es Salaam.  My children, however, are shivering uncontrollably in the freezing 70 degree cold.  And skin and hair and lips look like we’re in the dead of winter in Minnesota.

Costco is still awesome.  Almost as awesome as the air.  And really, just as important, right?

Everything is so quiet.  Like, really, really quiet.  Even when I’m outside with the kids, I keep telling them to keep their voices down, like they are breaking a sacred silence.  Night is so quiet.  No screeching bats and birds and insects.  No wedding party music.  Rarely even any car sounds.  It’s eerie.

There are no people to be seen.  I go for a walk with my girls, and we marvel at the lack of life.  No people, anywhere.  Does anyone even live here?  they ask.  If you go into a store, there you see people.  But not on the street.  No food being sold on the street.  No goats on the street.  Where are all the people?  And the goats?  Don’t they want to enjoy this amazing air?

Everything is so easy.  I don’t have to navigate between languages.  I can read every street sign.  The roads are straight and flat and organized and drivers don’t drive on the shoulder.  Gil said with wonder, I’m going to see how many days I can go without using my horn.  All the food in the store is at least half-prepared.  The lawns water themselves.  The garage doors open themselves.  The dishes wash themselves.

Meal times are the most exciting part of the day.  Yes, it’s lunch!  I can eat again!  And I just went to Costco!

My children are obsessed with the ice dispenser on their uncle’s fridge.  By 10 am every day, that thing has been cleaned out.  However, they are paranoid about tap water and drinking fountains.  Yes, you can drink the water.  Are you sure, Mommy?  Yes, you can drink the water!

I need a sign around my neck, Bear with me; I haven’t lived in America for a while. I’m not sure how to handle you, America.  But I sure do love your air.  And Costco.

Johnny with his grandpa and cousin

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