Category: How Americans Think Page 7 of 8

Deepest, Darkest, Dangerous….America

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On November 23, 2019

In How Americans Think

When we were in the process of moving to Tanzania, Gil and I tried to buy life insurance. We had two agents checking dozens of agencies for us, and neither could find a single life insurance agency willing to take us.

Why? Because we were moving to deepest, darkest, dangerous Africa. Um, what? We weren’t moving to a war zone. I wondered if the insurance companies knew something we didn’t.

Granted, we’ve had a few scary things happen to us here. There were a few years when violent home invasions were so common (we know more than a dozen friends who have experienced it) that we had a hard time sleeping at night. Yes, there’s malaria and Dengue fever. Sure, we worry that there’s no 911 to call. But you know what’s ironic? I’m a lot more worried about taking my kids to live in the States than I am about raising them in Tanzania.

Kids don’t get shot at schools in Tanzania. Gil and I spent 8 years living in Santa Clarita, where the most recent school shooting took place. I taught in the Saugus School District, where schools went on lockdown. I know a number of people (or their kids) who were at Saugus High School that day. Then I read that one victim was named Gracie. I have a Gracie. And the other victim, Dominic, looked a little like my Josiah. It hit home.

But it’s not just school shootings. It’s that I’m taking my kids to a country that isn’t always just or kind to dark-skinned people, especially young men. It’s a country where greed and materialism lurk around every corner, tempting my children to idolize “stuff” instead of living with gratefulness for what they have. A place where women’s skin sells, where girls have to fit into a cookie-cutter image to feel beautiful. Where the worldview fights to ingrain young people with a deeply fractured view of the body, a low view of life, and a flippancy towards sexuality.

Sure, my kids are exposed to some of those things while living in Tanzania. The internet is everywhere now, so there is no sheltering children from the worldview of America. But the truth is that my kids are living an extremely healthy life here. They go to a Christian school that is highly international both in students and staff; their teachers and coaches are deeply committed to them; they play lots of sports but it doesn’t take over their lives. They are daily exposed to poverty and are being trained in service. They live in a place that values community over time; there is very little junk food; there is only one store at the mall where they want to spend their money.

Relocating to America feels much more like moving to a scary foreign land than moving to Africa ever did.

It’s all perspective, of course. I did once write that Sometimes Africa Scares Me. There are no truly “safe” places on this side of eternity, not even in Santa Clarita, one of the safest cities in America.

But as a Christ-follower, is safety ever supposed to be my motivation? Am I supposed to be seeking after Heaven on earth? Or do I go where God leads me, and trust Him to be my safety?

Even in America.

What Did I Ever Do to Deserve This Blue Passport?

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On June 12, 2019

In How Americans Think, Poverty

I read this week: “Since last October, U.S. Border Patrol agents have apprehended 268,044 people who illegally crossed the southwest border…and about half of them were families…That’s a 300 percent jump in the number of family apprehensions compared with the same time period during the entire 2018 fiscal year.”

I’m not going to give my opinion on what the US government should do about this crisis; I’m not that stupid. Or rather, I am quite stupid, because I don’t know the answer. All I know is that those numbers take my breath away.

These are families. Moms and Dads and children and babies who are willing to walk for 2,800 miles in hopes of finding safety and a new life. Walk. For 2,800 miles. Or how about this from the same article? “Munoz and his family hauled themselves up on top of running freight trains and clung onto the top, the women taking turns to hold onto the baby.”

It’s beyond my comprehension. Walking with my children for thousands of miles, seeing dead bodies along the way, hoping for the goodwill of others to give us something to eat–all in the hope, the desperate, tiny hope–that a judge will pick my family out of a crowd of thousands and let me into a land where my children will be safe.

My family and I are traveling to the United States in just a couple of weeks. And I read this story and thought, Sheesh, all I had to do was contact our travel agent and it’s done. Tickets in hand. We’ll get to the airport in Los Angeles with our bleary eyes and disheveled clothes because 20 hours of travel feels like eternity. But we’ll show our blue passports and no one will blink an eye. No one will ask me questions. No walls will block my way. My children won’t be separated from me. I can hear the immigration officer’s nonchalant stamp in our passports. And we’re in.

All because God put my soul into the body of a person who happened to be born on US soil. That’s it. There is nothing else differentiating me from the soul of the Honduran woman holding desperately onto her baby with one hand and the top of a moving train with the other. I am not better than her. I am not more valuable than her. I have not worked harder than her. There’s nothing I have done that makes me deserve that blue passport more than her.

I don’t know the answer for the hundreds of thousands waiting for help outside America’s borders, or the hundreds of thousands more waiting for US embassy interviews in scores of other refugee camps around the world. But I do know one thing: At the very least, each of these people is worthy of our compassion. And each of these people should cause every American to pause and thank our lucky stars that somehow, some way, we ended up in America. Because for all its faults and divisions and weaknesses, it’s the country that millions of people around the world would give their right arm to get into.

Let’s not waste it.

Sitting in the Dust with the Disgraced American Church

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On March 24, 2019

In How Americans Think

In What’s So Amazing About Grace?, Philip Yancey tells the true story of a prostitute who rented out her two-year-old daughter to men in order to fund her drug addiction. When asked why she didn’t go to a church for help, she exclaimed: “Church! Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They’d just make me feel worse.”  



Dreadfully ironic, isn’t it? On one hand, there’s the prostitute who is afraid to go to church because of the lack of grace offered her, while on the other hand, the deacon-turned-child-molester is offered a free pass in the name of “grace.”



This is a humiliating time to be an American evangelical Christian. The disgraced missions agency. The disgraced mega-church pastor. The disgraced entire denomination. I’m afraid to read the news and see what’s next. So much muck, covered up for so many years. 



Every time, my internal response is horrified disgust. How can people like that call themselves Christians? And I want to do everything I can to disassociate myself with that person or that group or that church. I want to shine up my shoes and put on my kind face and show the world that not all Christians are so reprehensible. Most of us are decent, moral, good people, right? So please, won’t you like us again?



Then I wonder if that attitude is actually the elemental problem.



All my life I have struggled with the desire to be the good girl, to follow the good Christian rules of praying before meals and sticking a fish on my car and moving to deepest darkest Africa. There was this underlying current to the evangelical culture around me that if we all looked really nice and happy all the time, we would attract people to Jesus. So it makes sense that when we discovered that underneath that veneer was a lot of evil and depravity, we anxiously stuffed it under our perfectly vacuumed carpets. We felt a strong need to protect God’s reputation.



It’s ironic that God doesn’t seem to care about his reputation nearly as much as we do. We paste the smiles on, but he has no problem flinging those carpets aside for the world to see. If we won’t deal with our skeletons in the closet, then he’ll let a major news outlet do it for us. Considering the danger of hidden sin, perhaps even the media is a form of his grace.

We are so quick to condemn the Prosperity Gospel–the notion that God wants his people to be continuously healthy and increasingly wealthy–but what if there was an even more sinister Prosperity Gospel infiltrating our churches? A Gospel that says that God’s people would never abuse children, never be mentally ill, never struggle with gender or sexuality, never be narcissistic? Because we’re too good for that. Those kind of problems wouldn’t happen here.

So I’m asking myself this question: How do we, as the American Church, really, truly display God’s glory and his grace? Because looking nice and shiny and perfect on the outside has obviously not worked. One, because those on the outside see right through to the pride that under-girds that image, and two, because (duh) we actually haven’t been as nice and shiny and perfect as we thought we were. 


The dictionary defines “disgraced” as having fallen from favor or a position of power or honor; discredited. But what if being disgraced is actually God’s conduit for us to fall into grace?



The answer is right there in front of our faces, and we just keep forgetting it. The gospel acknowledges both the depravity of sin and the riches of mercy. These disgraces in the American church show us how far away we are from understanding real grace. We have no reason to boast and nothing to hide; in the end we are all beggars. Ironically, not unlike the prostitute.

Barbara Duguidwrites, “One reason God allows us to fall flat on our face is so we will not be people who stand before Him taking credit for His good work. We get confused about that. If we are strong and victorious in a certain area of our lives, we start writing books about how everybody can be as good as I am on this topic. But if God lets us fall flat on our face and we’re in the dust, we realize, ‘That wasn’t me. That was God, and left to myself, I’ll be flat on my face.’”



I am a part of the American Church, so I sit here with her in the dust, my reputation tarnished, my deepest secrets laid bare, my good name dragged through the mud. My choice is simple: Will I be the Pharisee, the one who prides myself on not being anything like those terribly disgusting people, and belligerently disassociate myself from having anything to do with them? Or will I be the tax collector who beats his breast and cries, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner?”



Only one went home justified that day. (Luke 18:9-14)



When Jesus faced a condemned prostitute, he got down in the dust with her. Maybe if we recognize that we deserve to be down in the dust too, Jesus will meet us there. And maybe, just maybe, the next time that prostitute needs a place of refuge, she’ll come to us. And we can find grace together.

Magic Charms and Contingency Plans

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On September 16, 2017

In How Africans Think, How Americans Think, Life in Tanzania


A few nights ago, Mama F came to me terrorized, begging and screaming for a certain plant in our backyard. 

I’ve lived in Tanzania for almost 14 years now, but there are still stories that blow me away.

I have a good friend, Allison (name changed), who has lived here as long as Gil and I have.  I don’t get to see her often, as she and her husband live several hours away in a remote village in Tanzania.  We may be living in the same country, but her life is very different from mine.  While visiting us this week, Allison told me this incredible story.

For a long time now, Allison had been sharing the gospel with Mama F, one of her neighbors.  And just a couple weeks ago, Mama F declared faith in Christ and started attending a Bible study led by Allison and her team.  They all praised God for this, not knowing that the story was just beginning….

This is how Allison tells it:

“A few nights ago, Mama F came to me terrorized, begging and screaming for a certain plant in our backyard.  Of course, I let her in to grab the unknown plant she named.  I soon saw that something had taken hold of her precious four-year-old daughter.  She was writhing and gurgling, clenched in her mother’s arms, and foaming at the mouth.  

Hearing Mama F’s cries, other neighbor women were coming to aid and we all followed as she ran back to her house while smearing my basil plant all over little F’s head.  The father had run for the witchdoctor to buy emergency witchcraft to ward off the attack.  Mama F
would not accept my westernized offer to take them to the hospital.  

We women entered into her home, trying to be of help in any way we
could.  One woman shook and rubbed a live chicken over little F — spraying who knows what all over her.  Another brought a pouch with herbs to burn and handfuls of a certain type of dirt to make a mud mixture to smear over her disrobed body.  Mama F frantically gulped a liquid from a cup and spewed it onto her daughter.  Then she placed knives under her armpits and behind her neck, wrapped F in banana leaves and tied a new black cloth charm around F’s wrist to join the others that fruitlessly encircled her body already. The ladies began to burn the weeds gathered so that smoke filled the room.  All the while, F was writhing and foaming, enveloped in darkness.

A long time ago, the Lord compelled me into these neighbors’ lives and now–as I walked that night with these women I love who were so fear stricken, so
desperate to save this child in the only ways they knew of– I prayed silently and out loud for His Light to shine in the living nightmare.  Then He enabled me to speak simple, childlike words in this dark chaos of fear and despair.  ‘God is able to help and heal F.  This witchcraft will not work.  May I pray for her in Jesus’ name?  May I hold her in my arms and pray for God’s healing?  I can ask for help from Almighty, Holy God because I believe Jesus shed his blood to pay for my sin so I am forgiven. Please let me pray for her.’

Miraculously they agreed!

But I knew there was more needing to be said.  ‘Mama F, because God is holy and only He deserves glory, you have to stop this witchcraft.  He wants you to see it is by His power and grace alone that F is healed. Please remove the
knives, the leaves…’

Miraculously they agreed and placed her in my arms!

I squatted down on the dirt floor, holding that precious, terrorized little
girl in my arms and I prayed.  As I prayed, I felt the conviction of the
Holy Spirit that this was not just a physical need for healing, but
spiritual.  So, in Jesus name, I prayed against the powers of darkness
over this little one.  In Jesus’ name, I rebuked satan and told him to
leave.  In Jesus’ name, I entrusted F into God’s arms of healing and
protection.

And God heard and answered!  As I prayed, the convulsions and foaming and gurgling ceased and F laid peacefully in my arms.  I heard the women’s voices declare,  ‘Wow!  The prayer is working!  God Heals!  Jesus Heals!  God hears the prayers of Christians!  Let’s go find more Christians to pray for her!’  So we returned to my house where my teammates had been waiting and they too surrounded F with prayer and praise to God for her healing.  And with F still in my arms exhausted, but at peace, my teammates and I lingered with our neighbors in our front yard and on our front porch, praising God for His healing in word, prayer, and song.”

But the story is still not over. Allison sat in my kitchen Wednesday evening, telling me what had just happened the night before.

She continued: “Mama F had attended the ladies prayer group in our home again and gave praise to Jesus for his healing in her child.  Then a few days later F came to our home to play, wearing her charm necklace again.  

I spoke to her Mom that God does not share His glory with another and F does not need the charms for her health and protection when we cry out to the one true God through Jesus Christ.  She agreed, but the necklace charm remained.  I also shared that with believing in Jesus Christ as her Savior, she is now a daughter of the King and she herself can ask her Father God for anything in His Name!   There is no need to fear, nor appease the forces of darkness. But the necklace remained.  

Tuesday evening, the terrors came again to F.  Since we were here in Dar when the attack came on, little F’s family sought the help of our team (Tanzanian and American) who together prayed and read Scripture over her, but this time she was not responding and they agreed to take her to the clinic in the neighboring village.  

When I received word of this, I asked if she was still wearing any charms.  And she was still wearing her charm necklace.  My husband called Baba F and exhorted him to remove the charms as God will not share His glory with another.  Meanwhile the doctor was not able to help F and so they brought F to our local evangelist where they cut off her charm necklace and began to pray for her again.  She was immediately restored to normal!”

Glory be to God!

It is, indeed, truly a remarkable story–especially for those of us who assume that this kind of thing ended in the New Testament.  But it would be a shame for those of us from westernized cultures, who scoff at magic charms and witchdoctors, to think that God isn’t trying to teach us the same lessons that he was teaching little F’s family.

He wants the glory alone.  

And his glory is never evident in contingency plans.

I’ve thought about this constantly since I heard Allison’s story.  How often do I have a contingency plan?  How often do I say the words that God is faithful and God is good, but in the back of my mind, have my own little plan of what I’ll do if God doesn’t show up?

Sure, I say I believe in heaven and that it’s forever and that life here is only a shadow of what’s to come.  But really, I want to enjoy that shadow with as much comfort as I can muster and as much pleasure as I can hold onto–just in case heaven doesn’t come.

Sure, I know that God is the rightful king and sovereign over the universe.  But I’d also really like to be under a government that is just, safe, powerful, and holds to all of my values–and I’m distressed if I don’t get that.

Sure, I believe that God is the source of all peace and healing.  But my first instinct in times of pain or sickness or fear is to turn to doctors and medicine, not to prayer.

Sure, I believe that Scripture tells me that God will provide for all my needs.  But I want that savings account to be steady and that income to be regular, just in case.

I know there’s a balance here, because I need to be wise and prudent and God’s gifts to me include homes and medicine and savings accounts.  But where is the source of my trust?  Am I really trusting in God, or in my contingency plans?

And sometimes, God might just be waiting for us to cut off the magic charm.  Because He will not share His glory with another.

The Story of Reality

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On May 25, 2017

In Book Recommendations, How Americans Think


This story is not a fairy tale, but rather it is the Story all fairy tales are really about.  Indeed, almost every tale ever written is an echo of this story embedded deep within our hearts.  Yet this story is not a tale at all since the Story is true.  

As I read The Story of Reality, I kept thinking, “Where has this book been all my life?”

Every religion tells a story of reality.  Every philosophy and every individual outlook on life is a take on the way someone thinks the world actually is.  There is no escaping it.  

I’ve looked for a book like this for years.  I can remember sitting on the floor of the Christian bookstore (back when Christian bookstores were a thing), scanning through dozens of books, trying to find one suitable to give to a non-Christian friend.  I wanted something that explained Christianity in a compelling, winsome way, but wasn’t overly academic or complicated.  I was looking for this book.  I guess I never found it until now because it was just published in January.

Gregory Koukl’s The Story of Reality:  How the World Began, How it Ends, and Everything Important that Happens In Between is kind of a worldview book, but not really.  It’s kind of an apologetics book (a defense of Christianity), but not really.  It’s kind of like a fascinating conversation with a really smart, really kind, Christian friend.  That’s what it feels like.

There is a saying that has been helpful in some ways but I think is misleading in this regard.  The saying goes, ‘God has a wonderful plan for your life.’  From what I understand now, that perspective is in the wrong order.  The Story is not so much about God’s plan for your life as it is about your life for God’s plan.  Let that sink in.  God’s purposes are central, not yours.  Once you are completely clear on this fact, many things are going to change for you.

This book is extremely readable and entirely enjoyable.  It’s only 200 pages.  It’s non-fiction, but written like a story, in a conversational, highly understandable, relational tone.  It’s easy enough for a 14-year-old to understand, yet profound enough for a deep-thinking adult to contemplate.

Now, I realize that the idea that God is in charge is bothersome to many people, but what is the alternative?  If someone is not in charge, then no one is in charge, and that seems to be a big part of our complaint about the world to begin with.

From now on, this is the book I will give to a friend who has an interest in Christianity.  This is a book I will read aloud with my kids when they are young teenagers–allowing us lots of time for all the conversations it will spark.  But this is not a book just for inquirers into Christianity.  It’s for any Christian who wants a shot of adrenaline, a reminder of who we are and why we are here and what we are living for.  This book truly is a gift to God’s Church, and I hope that you’ll look for ways to use it in your circle of influence.

First, trouble, hardship, difficulty, pain, suffering, conflict, tragedy, evil–they are all part of the Story.  It is the reason there is any Story at all.  The Story not only explains the evil people do; it predicts it.  Our world is exactly the kind of world we’d expect it to be if the Story were true and not just religious wishful thinking.

Second–and more important–our Story is not over yet.  Evil did not catch God by surprise.

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