Category: American Worldview Page 7 of 9

I Get to Vote, but This Still Is Not My Country

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On October 19, 2020

In American Worldview, Living Like a Missionary in America

I lived as a foreigner through several election cycles in Tanzania. As a foreigner, that meant I had an opinion about elections, but I didn’t expect it to matter very much. I listened to Tanzanian friends give me their view on the candidates, but I stayed relatively objective. My goal was to understand their thoughts because I wanted to understand their hearts. I was there to reach people with the gospel, not get mired down in political arguments. My purpose there was to love all Tanzanians, not take sides. 

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What Your Grandmother’s Piano Had to Do With Slavery in Zanzibar

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On January 12, 2020

In American Worldview, Race and Diversity

In Victorian America, having a piano in your home was a sign of being cultured, sophisticated, and educated. Ironically, the story behind those pianos was one of slavery, oppression, and death.

“By 1900 more than half of the world’s pianos were made in the United States. In 1910, piano production in the United States was growing at a rate six times faster than the population.” (1) Yet before the advent of plastic, what was essential for piano production? Ivory. Ivory from East African elephants.

Just over 100 years ago, there existed a unique connection between Victorian New England and Zanzibar, which is a large inhabited island just off the coast of what is now known as Tanzania. America wanted ivory. Africa had elephants. And the port where thousands of tusks funneled through was on the island of Zanzibar.

Most of that ivory ended up in Connecticut, at a manufacturing village appropriately called “Ivoryton,” which milled an estimated 100,000 elephant tusks before 1929. At the industry’s height, over 350,000 pianos were sold each year. (2)

I’ve lived in Tanzania for sixteen years, and visited Zanzibar many times, and I never knew this until I recently explored the new museum attached to David Livingstone’s church. I knew that Zanzibar was home to a massive slave industry in the 19th century; I knew that missionary David Livingstonewas instrumental in ending that slave trade. Many times, I have visited the church he had built on the site of the slave market, with the altar placed strategically on the spot where slaves had been tied up and whipped.

But all this time, I didn’t know there was a connection between East African slavery and America, because most American slaves came from West Africa. (East African slaves were usually sent to Arab countries and colonial British plantations.) Yet the Connecticut ivory industry fueled a large part of East African slavery. Each of those 100 pound tusks had to be carried, by hand, for hundreds of miles from the African interior. The journey was so grueling, and the slave drivers so cruel, that David Livingstone once estimated that 5 slaves died for every tusk.

We all know about slaves coming out of Africa. What I have also recently learned, both through reading about the rubber trade in Congo and now the ivory trade in Tanzania, was that hundreds of thousands of Africans were enslaved in their own homeland. Though it is certainly fair to say that most of these people were captured, owned, and sold by their fellow Africans, it was the the insatiable desire for Africa’s resources by Europeans and Americans that fueled the demand for doing business in human souls.

I imagine early 20th century Americans, gathering around their new pianos in their prim and proper Victorian parlors, gaily singing Christmas carols while the snow silently falls outside. It’s the quintessential American picture, is it not?

Yet what was the cost of that picture-perfect scene? I haven’t mentioned the mass destruction and near extinction of African elephants–which is a tragedy in and of itself. But even more tragic was that those pianos were built on the backs of suffering and death of countless African men, women, and children.

Did average Americans know this at the time? Probably not. But thinking about this tragedy made me contemplate what this generation of Americans does know. We’ve all heard the reports, right? Our cocoa and coffee harvested by children in developing countries, the profit from the tantalum in our cell phones used to fuel civil wars in Africa, designer clothes created by near-slave-like conditions in Bangladesh or India. So many of the comforts around us were built on the backs of someone else’s suffering. 

What do we do about it? I hear you asking. And honestly, I don’t know. The problem is incredibly complicated. I don’t have answers.

Yet, knowing these things is still good for our souls. This knowledge should humble us, convict us, make us wiser. It should help us to be more careful in what we buy. More aware. More generous. More grateful.

The Anglican church in Zanzibar which was inspired by David Livingstone’s fight to end slavery on the island. The church is built on the site of the main slave market.
Under the church, two holding chambers have been preserved. Each of these chambers would hold up to 50 slaves at a time, waiting for sale.

“This crucifix [is] made from the wood of the tree under which Dr. Livingstone died at Chitambo village, Ilala, Zambia in 1873, and under which his heart [is] buried.”

My sources for this article came from the museum at Livingstone’s church, as well as these two sites:

(1) Connecticut Explored: Ivoryton

(2) Ivory Cutting: The Rise and Decline of a Connecticut Industry

All pictures by Gil Medina.

Deepest, Darkest, Dangerous….America

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On November 23, 2019

In American Worldview

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 American Worldview, 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 American Worldview

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.

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