Author: Amy Medina Page 8 of 229

Worth Your Time (July 2023)

On July 26, 2023

In Book Recommendations, Worth Your Time

Trying something new! Instead of doing a couple of posts a year with my book recommendations, I’m going to write them monthly, and include links to videos and other resources as well. Feel free to share your ideas with me!

Videos and Music:

Maverick City Music sounds beautiful but is even more wonderful to watch.
Vocamonix is an excellent Nigerian acapella group.

Universe Size Comparison –for when you need to remember how small you are and simultaneously how incredible you are.
College softball players with a 53-game winning streak talk about the difference between happiness and joy.

Articles:

Embrace Your Otherness by Jen Wilkin: “Sweet child, study the way you are feeling today. Because I love you, I ask this of you: lean into your “otherness”—learn the contours of its face, feel out the steady grip of its hand. Because I intend it to be your lifelong companion. It is a truer friend than those who surround you now. More than I want your comfort, I want you to be an alien and a stranger.”

This is Pro-Life: Powerful Photos of Older People with Downs Syndrome Defy Misconceptions

Books:

Lots of people are talking about the “Shiny Happy People” documentary about Bill Gothard and the Duggars–and it’s important. Jinger Duggar Vuolo’s memoir Becoming Free Indeed tells a similar story, but I appreciated how she gave a nuanced perspective on her childhood and her family, and how she carefully “disentangled” Gothard’s legalism from true faith. It’s a courageous book.

All My Knotted-Up Life by Beth Moore was both delightful and sobering. I’d only read one other Beth Moore book, but I’ve admired her insight, humor, and grace on Twitter, and this memoir only increased my respect for her. She’s a gifted storyteller so it’s a page-turner on its own, but it’s also an important book because of what it reveals about American evangelical culture. I highly recommend it.

Gil teaches a section on dating and relationships in one of his Bible classes, so he’s always reading up on what’s happening in American culture on this topic. He talked so much about American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus by Lisa Wade that I decided I needed to read it myself. It’s not a Christian book, but that doesn’t keep it from revealing how the hookup culture on college campuses is scarring our young people. This is a very hard book to stomach–but is a must-read for any parents sending their children off to college.

I was completely ignorant about how difficult it is to take down sex offenders until I read What is a Girl Worth?: My Story of Breaking the Silence and Exposing the Truth about Larry Nassar and USA Gymnastics by Rachael Denhollander. Even though Nassar had abused hundreds of girls, no one could stop him until Rachael–a tenacious lawyer–put everything in her life on the line to find justice. It is a compelling and eye-opening story.

Pictures are from our trip to Yosemite and Gold Country in June.

This is What 50 Years of Faithfulness Looks Like

By Amy Medina

On June 16, 2023

In Parenting, Thoughts on Missions

My parents, Kim and Margaret Coutts, have been married 50 years this month, a milestone that only 5% of American marriages achieve. They have extraordinary lives, worth writing about.

My dad was serving as a pharmacist at a military hospital at Fort Dix, New Jersey when a fellow officer knocked on his door and asked, “If you died tonight, would you go to heaven?”

My dad was irritated – angry, even – but couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was just one of many instances in their early adulthood when God inserted Himself into their story, and it wasn’t much longer before they turned their lives over to Him. It wasn’t a flippant decision. It was the beginning of an entire re-orientation of their priorities.

About four years later, my mom and dad attended a missions conference at First Baptist Church in San Jose – the one whose foyer boasted the spiral ramp that surrounded the two-story fountain. When the speaker gave a challenge, while the background music played, they walked forward to the altar to offer their lives in missionary service.

They spent almost a decade of service in missions in Liberia and Ethiopia, despite my mom crying every single day for the first six months. It was a sacrifice: her own mother refused to write or speak to her for the entire first two years. My mom taught elementary school, and my dad served as head pharmacist at ELWA Hospital, then as hospital administrator.

The year we returned, while still working as chief pharmacist at Kaiser, my dad went on to revolutionize the missions program at Hillside Church in San Jose. He started the partnership with Tanzania that changed the course of my life and dozens of others. He began a missions prayer ministry that has continued for three decades. He led numerous other short-term trips and developed several other overseas partnerships.

Meanwhile, while my mom taught kindergarten, she launched a ministry in the low-income neighborhood down the street from our church. Thirty years later, that ministry has flourished and is thriving. My mom invested in scores of children in that neighborhood, including taking in two of them for several of their college years, enveloping them as surrogate daughters.

My parents have done some big things in their 50 years of marriage. But what strikes me the most is how they have been faithful in the little things, the things that most people don’t see.

Your Short-Term Trip Should Be About You (and that’s not a bad thing).

By Amy Medina

On June 12, 2023

In A Life Overseas, Thoughts on Short-Term Missions Trips

It’s kind of a short-term mission trip mantra: “This trip shouldn’t be about you. It’s about the people you are serving.”

I’m here to flip that on its head: This trip isn’t mostly about the people you are serving. It actually should be primarily about you.

And that’s not a bad thing. Stick with me here; don’t write me off yet.

Let’s start with the second part: this trip is not about the people you are serving.

There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to come right out with it: if this trip were really about the people on the other side, then you would just take the $20,000 your team raised and send it to the missionaries or local pastors instead.

They could support the local economy by buying the supplies you are bringing. They could hire locals to build the house or paint the church – people who are likely desperate for work. They could pay for an expert to train the church members to run the VBS themselves (in the local language) and supplement the income of those church members who need to take time off of work to serve. And with the extra, they could support a local pastor. Or top up the deficit in their ministry account.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that your service is a waste of time. Certainly, God can use you to touch lives. But my point is this: it is unlikely that a team who doesn’t know the language or culture will be able to make a measurable impact in a foreign country in seven to ten days. Often, there are already people living in the country who could do the exact same ministry themselves if necessary. (I know there are exceptions, but that’s not what I’m talking about today.)

In spite of all this, I’m still a fan of short-term missions. This is not an anti-missions-trip article. Those are out there. This is not one of them.

So why do I still encourage these trips? Because I believe God can use them to transform lives. Not necessarily the lives of the people you are serving. But your life? Yes!

Because your short-term trip is actually about you.

Enduring Death to Taste Resurrection

By Amy Medina

On May 27, 2023

In Re-Entry to America, What I'm Learning

What does it mean to live out the resurrection of Jesus every day?

In the spring of 2020, I stepped out every morning under the East African sun onto a piece of heaven called Haven of Peace Academy. Palm trees framed the sunrise over the Indian Ocean, as newly hatched white butterflies decorated the 17-acre campus that was my home for almost 20 years. As elementary principal, I was surrounded by children; everywhere I turned, there was someone to talk to – a parent, a teacher, a toothless, dancing first grader. I ate lunch with friends from Denmark, India and Zimbabwe; every conversation was alive with culture and rich diversity and perspective. My days were full of problems to solve, music, laughter and light.

Six months later, I woke up every morning in my small Southern California apartment with beige walls and beige carpet and drove the kids to school. Then I sat on the brown couch we bought for fifty dollars and was bombarded by silence. My new job was remote, so I faced the computer all day; my only interactions with other people were through that screen.

I sat at my tiny kitchen table and ate lunch with a magazine. I went to the grocery store, to church, to pick up my kids again and never recognized anyone. Six feet and masks barred me from getting acquainted. I was alone and I was unknown. 

A season of suffering and grief

The deaths in my life in 2020 lined up like tombstones. The death of my self-respect: being forced to leave Tanzania three months early engulfed my head in shame. The death of feeling competent, knowledgeable, relevant: starting a new job was like becoming a toddler again. The death of being known: the wealth of my relationships in Tanzania took 20 years to build.

Some of these losses would have come regardless of how we transitioned, but the pandemic compounded the grief. And inside was a yawning emptiness.

I was starting my life over from scratch. I lifted my weary eyes to climb that mountain again, and it felt insurmountable. I was restless, anxious to jump ahead, to skip the hard parts.

But it was there, in the emptiness, where a new facet flashed on the gospel’s diamond. In the descent into shame and loss, I found a deeper identification with Christ. 

Read the rest at the EFCA blog.

At Least Bugs Are Not Snakes: Contending For Contentment

By Amy Medina

On May 17, 2023

In How Americans Think, What I'm Learning

My house in Tanzania could have been an insectarium. Maybe I should have charged admission to tourists.

One year, the kitchen was infested with cockroaches. The little ones would run out of the toaster and I would smash them with my fist.

Another year, it was ticks. Like, literally, ticks were climbing the walls of my kitchen. The engorged ones would burst open and then the live ones would leave tiny bloody footprints on the floor.

Twice, guests in our home were stung by centipedes in their beds in the middle of the night.

Then there was the Year of the Millipedes, which don’t sting but, at six inches long, are unpleasant to find curled up on your wooden spoon or inside your shoe. Johnny spent months sharing Josiah’s bed due to millipede-phobia. Josiah once smashed one with a hammer, triumphantly announcing that he had killed his prey. I usually picked them up with my fingers and flushed them alive down the toilet.

Each time we victoriously exterminated one species, another moved in.

But we didn’t have it so bad. My friend Alyssa lived in a house infested with snakes, and after the seventeenth one, they finally moved. Their new house’s attic was infested with bats, and the guano sprinkled like glitter over her children’s beds. So millipedes? No biggie.

My house had a miniature kitchen sink that couldn’t fit my biggest pot. It had weird pink tiles in the living room and all sorts of half-steps throughout the rooms that guests tripped over. It had no cross-breeze, and so was hot and stuffy. The windows were always open, leaving a fine layer of dust on everything.

My friend Lucy and her family of six lived in a home where she bought 25 gallons of water each day from a neighbor half a block away. It cost her about 15 percent of her monthly salary, and she carried that water in buckets back to her house.

My house had tiled floors and polished wood ceilings. I had indoor plumbing and electricity that worked most times and a generator when it didn’t. I had an air conditioner in my bedroom to push out the tropical heat while we slept. Bugs and all, compared to Lucy, I lived in luxury.

Yet Lucy considered herself blessed because she only had to walk half a block to get water, instead of the miles that many women in Tanzania have to walk. She and her husband owned their cinderblock home. Her roof boasted a solar panel so they could run fans at night. By Tanzanian standards, they were almost middle class. “We are poor,” she told me once, with a twinkle in her eye (Lucy’s eyes were always twinkling), “But we are not very, very poor.”

So how could I whine about my bugs? Despite them, I was still freakishly wealthy. I was surrounded by people who had it way worse than we did. So I went along smashing and flushing bugs, and I was content.

When we moved into our home in California, it felt like I was living in a vacation rental. I had vaulted ceilings and large windows with a cascade of light. I had a walk-in closet. I had a giant sink and a dishwasher. Every night when I turned off the lights, I would stand on the stairwell and gaze at it all, disbelieving that I lived there. I had zero bugs.

Six months later, I was walking around my neighborhood and came to the housing development next to ours. I noticed differences: these houses were a bit larger. Nicer trimmings. More spacious driveways. That would be nice, I thought. Maybe we should have held out for a house in this neighborhood instead.

Discontentment descended in a flash.