One Sunday morning in Tanzania, I slid down the polished wooden bench in the airy sanctuary at the church we attended. The long room sat in the shadow of an enormous banyan tree, roots dangling from formidable branches. The open windows let in the ocean breeze, the sounds of the busy street and the occasional bird or cat.
On the pew, I found a paper left behind from the Friday night vigil that weekend. It listed a structured schedule of prayer, singing, Scripture reading, testimonies and discussion. Start time: 10:00 p.m. End time: 5:00 a.m. My American eyes examined this with horrified fascination. Attending church for 7 hours in the middle of the night was beyond my comprehension.
Yet, to be a Christian in Tanzania is to attend all-night prayer vigils. Some churches hold them every weekend. For others, it’s once a quarter. It’s such a part of church culture that the church leaders at our Bible school expressed shock when they heard that American evangelical churches generally don’t practice this.
“How can they even call themselves Christian?” they gaped.
A different point of view
In contrast, American Christians might say the same thing about Tanzanians when they find out that, in general, Tanzanian churches don’t prioritize personal daily devotions. American Sunday school kids grew up singing, Read your Bible, pray every day and you will grow, grow, grow! Search “devotional books” on Amazon and you’ll find hundreds of choices. Every January, the blogosphere is littered with Bible-reading plans. In American evangelicalism, the quintessential mark of spirituality is the discipline of daily Bible reading.
How can two cultures prioritize the means of spiritual growth so differently?
I’ve always been a fan of yard sales and thrift stores, but a couple of years ago I discovered something truly marvelous: estate sales.
Are you familiar with estate sales? This isn’t your ordinary yard sale where you’ll find mostly junk and the occasional treasure. An estate sale is when the entire contents of a house is for sale. Like, the door is open and you go into the rooms, the closets, and cupboards. You can buy anything that isn’t nailed down.
I find these sales using EstateSales.net, and there are sales posted in my area every month – sometimes every week.
Estate sales have taken the palace of Target runs for me. I barely ever use Amazon either.
Gil and I keep a joint running list on our phones of things we are looking for. Buying things this way means that we often have to wait a while before we find it. But if we’re patient, we can find almost anything. Here are a few examples of recent purchases:
Paper shredder Trifle bowl Beach towels Deck box Shoe organizer Waffle iron Dog harness Mini crock pot Suitcase & duffle bags Flatware utensil set (an extra set for hosting large groups = no more plastic forks!) Whirley Pop Popcorn pan (I was so excited to find this – I had been looking for over a year!)
All of these things were purchased in excellent condition and at a fraction of the original cost. Almost every item in our home was pre-owned, and we have saved thousands of dollars this way.
Plus, it’s fun! Our city has lots of old Victorian homes, so even if I don’t end up buying anything, I enjoy getting a peek into these exquisite houses.
But there’s one more reason why I’m a fan of shopping this way: Estate sales provide me with a built-in caution against buying things I don’t need.
This was a first for me: I’ve read hundreds of books in my life, but I’ve never stopped a book halfway through and started back at the beginning. I was so struck by the significance of what I was reading.
First, some background. Until 2020, I hadn’t lived in the United States as an adult for more than a few months at a time. So I’ve had a lot to catch up on these last couple of years. And now that I’ve figured out the basics, like which are the best deals at Costco, how to pay my water bill, and how to navigate media-streaming (okay, well, Gil still has to do this for me), I’m ready to move on to deeper things like, “How do I live as a Christian in America?”
Maybe this seems like a no-brainer, but I’ve spent an exorbitant amount of time thinking about it. Many missionaries languish back in the States, like life no longer has the meaning and purpose it did overseas. I wrestle with this but keep thinking: If I’m living the gospel anywhere I am, it shouldn’t feel that way.
Also, because I’ve lived out of the country for half of my life, I have the curse (and the blessing) of seeing things about my culture from a different perspective. I can’t listen to the commentary on Christian radio without mulling over how a Tanzanian friend might interpret it. I can’t go grocery shopping without thinking about how an African in poverty might judge what I buy.
In November, I wrote a piece for the EFCA blog called Swimming in the Stuff of America. It’s about my struggle to steward my extraordinary wealth as an American, and in my opinion, it’s one of the most important things I’ve written in 15 years of blogging. Top 5, probably. Yet some of the responses I received puzzled me – people who insinuated that I shouldn’t feel so bad – like I was struggling over nothing.
Gil and I are co-teaching an adult class at church, and he recently asked the group to list some “acceptable sins” in America. Not a single person mentioned materialism or consumerism, and I just about fell off my chair because for me, that sin is squawking loudly with glaring blinking lights.
Sometimes I feel like an alien, like I speak a different language that no one understands. And I wonder if I’m just completely crazy.
I spent my first years of life in suburban California, and I assumed every person on earth had a TV and a bike and a refrigerator that magically produced food. As a fish doesn’t know anything besides water, I couldn’t conceive of anything besides middle-class.
I moved to Liberia when I was six years old, and the boy on the other side of our fence ate frogs out of the swamp when his family ran out of food. I met girls who walked miles to haul water while I walked to my privileged international school. I later lived 16 of my adult years in Tanzania, where my rickety van and millepede-infested house felt like luxury. I didn’t have a dishwasher, a dryer or central air conditioning, but I had electricity and plumbing, and that lifted me above most Tanzanians.
I was a fish out of water, gasping for breath at the dichotomy between my life and theirs.
Now I’ve been back in America for two years, and I find myself slowly captivated by the middle-class ocean. The voices calling me from billboards and magazines and screens are persistent: You need more. You deserve more. It’s your right. I don’t want to listen, but I do.
Americans make up only 4 percent of the world’s population yet hold 31 percent of the world’s wealth. As a little girl, I dreamed of being a princess, and then living in Africa revealed to me that I already had royal status. How Rich Am I? tells me that even on my ministry income, I am richer than 94% of the world’s population. That can only be defined as aristocracy.
Americans spent over 10 billion dollars on Halloween this year, which is more than the entire GDP of 60 countries. Americans will spend around 900 billion dollars for Christmas, which is more than the GDP of 173 countries – all but 17. Just Christmas. Scientists estimate that if everyone on earth lived the lifestyle of Americans, it would take five planet Earths to support them all. Guess that means I should be “glad” most people are poorer than Americans.
Yet when I drive through neighborhoods of houses that look just like mine with a Starbucks and a Panera on every corner, when everyone around me goes to Disneyland and Outback Steakhouse, I struggle to put my head above the water and remember how most of the world lives. It’s easy to fool myself into believing that just about everyone has what I have, that I am in the majority. Or perhaps I’m poorer than the majority since I can’t afford pedicures, cruises and designer purses.
A friend in Tanzania wrote to tell us that he hasn’t had a job for a year, so could we front him the money to start a new business? And my immediate thought was no, because I just found out this morning that my child needs braces.
And my next thought was that I just chose braces over my friend’s desperation to put food on the table and pay school fees for his kids.
I like to pretend I’m not wealthy. Jesus said that to whom much has been given, much will be required, so if I’m not rich, He can’t require much of me. I can hunker down and pay for braces and not worry about people who need the money more than I do.
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.
