Category: My Memoirs

Five Years In

On March 25, 2025

Today, March 25th, is five years since I left Tanzania. Tomorrow will be five years since I’ve been back in the States.

A few weeks ago, I took our dog Mzungu out for a walk at night because it rained all day and when it is raining, he refuses to go outside to do his business unless he is on a leash on a walk. I didn’t want to bother with both the leash and an umbrella, so I figured we’d be quick and I wouldn’t get too wet.

We had an incredibly dry winter in Southern California. It had been months and months since it really rained here, so my senses soaked in the rain just like the thirsty earth. The dog did what he needed to do, but I found myself still walking.

The dark streets were empty and the windows glowed warm, and the rain dripped off my hair into my eyes and seeped through my jacket, but I kept walking.

And I walked and I remembered. I wasn’t thinking at all about Africa, and then suddenly I was. Rain, in my memories, is synonymous with Africa.

I remembered walking home from school in Liberia when the dusty red roads would turn into muddy red rivers and my flip-flops would splatter red on the backs of my legs. Thunder would roar around me and lightning would crack onto the ocean and I would twirl and dance in the warmth and power engulfing me.

I remembered my children in Tanzania, shoving on their rainboots and charging outside, returning sopping and breathless and pleading for hot chocolate (though it couldn’t possibly have been under 80 degrees).

Some months it rained so often that I told teachers to send their kids out for recess in the rain unless it was pouring, and I remembered their plastered hair and shining faces, piles of shoes outside each classroom.

I rarely bothered with an umbrella in Africa. The rain was either too light and I knew I would dry off quickly, or it was too strong and an umbrella would be useless anyway.

Sleeping to the sound of rain on a tin roof. Wet feet in sandals. Dark skies, temperamental ocean waves. Crystals dripping off hibiscus petals.

And now it’s been five years. It’s strange how for so many years I couldn’t see the end to living in Africa, and now all of a sudden, it’s been five years since I left.

So as I walked and remembered, the wetness from my eyes mingled with the wetness from the sky. I miss Africa. Yet the memories are latent now. They don’t sit on my chest and keep me from breathing. It feels like a long time ago, and that makes me sad. I don’t think of it every day anymore, and that makes me sad.

I was talking to a friend who returned from serving overseas a couple of years after I did. She was fresh in the grief of leaving the place she loved, and I assured her that it would eventually be okay – things would get better. She asked me: Did it really get better, or did you just get used to it?

I’ve thought about that question for a long while. Because those losses I felt so acutely at the beginning – the loss of community, the loss of a life that overflowed with meaning and purpose, curiosity and discovery – those things have not been replaced. I have grown content with dimmer substitutes instead. I’ve just gotten used to it.

Of course, nostalgia has a way of bringing to the surface only the sweetness while the bitter seems fuzzy. Part of the reason that African rain was so sweet was because the heat was so oppressive. Driving and sleeping and cooking and communicating are infinitely easier in America. I love that my house has no bugs in it. I love being able to walk my neighborhood at night and feel safe.

Yet even in these perks, there is a sense of loss. Being challenged daily, realizing I could do more and be more than I originally thought I was capable of, seeing tangible results of sanctification in my heart – those African inconveniences turned out to be quite convenient indeed.

Perhaps this is why, even after five years back in my passport country, I still often feel like I am floating on the outside of things. I hover here – my body planted firmly in one country, my soul forever existing in divided loyalty. Yet it’s worth it. I wouldn’t change it for anything.

One Year Later
Two Years In
Three Years In

Once You See It, You Can’t Unsee It

By Amy Medina

On April 4, 2024

In My Memoirs, Thoughts on Missions

I loved telling this story–one of my favorites from our years in Tanzania.

One of the first things that stood out to Peter and Eunice when they visited Reach Tanzania Bible School was that the teachers drank out of the same plastic cups as the students. In their denomination, the leadership would remain distant from those under them. Visiting guest pastors would choose the best hotels and restaurants. And certainly, they wouldn’t socialize with their students.

But they knew they had found a unique Bible school in Tanzania when they heard the philosophy of the director, Mark Dunker, a ReachGlobal missionary. “If you are looking for a paper to hang on your wall, this is not the right place for you,” Mark told them. “Here we teach for life change.”

Peter and Eunice were instantly hooked—this was the place they had been looking for. They didn’t realize their lives were about to change far more than they could have ever imagined.

By the time Peter and Eunice stepped into Reach Tanzania Bible School in early 2017, they had already been full-time pastors and missionaries for 20 years. Originally from Kenya, they had joined their denomination (founded by American missionaries) as young adults with a sincere desire to serve God wholeheartedly. They received some mentoring and then were sent to locations all over East Africa, evangelizing, pastoring churches and discipling others.

They were shining stars in their large international denomination, faithful to teach the truth about how to be born again from Acts 2:36-38: Repent and be baptized. Peter explained that repentance meant regularly making lists of your sins, publicly confessing, and often being publicly rebuked and humiliated in front of the church. Once you’d cleaned up your life enough, you were ready to be baptized—and you weren’t saved until that moment. And even once you had been baptized, you lived in daily fear that you might mess up too much to keep your salvation.

Like Cornelius or Apollos, Peter and Eunice feared God, earnest in their pursuit of Him. Before being assigned to his denomination’s church in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Peter took classes at a Pentecostal seminary. He agreed to go to Tanzania in 2013 with permission from his leadership that he continue to pursue Bible education, but theological education is sparse in Tanzania. So in 2017, when Eunice saw a Facebook ad for Reach Tanzania pop up in her feed and noticed it was not far from their home, they decided to check it out.

They quickly signed up and started classes shortly after, but Eunice was disappointed to see that the first required course was on Bible study methods. “I have already been studying the Bible for 20 years,” she thought. “What else are they going to teach me?”

She was about to get the shock of her life. The first of many.

Go to the EFCA blog to read the rest.

Finding Grace in Infertility and Loss

By Amy Medina

On December 11, 2023

In Adoption, My Memoirs

Last week at a pre-op appointment, I needed to sign a document that read, “I understand that I will not be able to become pregnant if I undergo this procedure,” and my breath caught in my throat and tears stung my eyes.

The next moment, that reaction surprised me. I am 47 years old and I haven’t thought about becoming pregnant in years. I long ago lost the hope of bearing a child and eventually lost the desire as well. But somehow initialing my name next to that sentence compressed the last 20 years, and I was suddenly a young wife again, crying over Dollar Store pregnancy tests that stubbornly refused to show me two pink lines.

The Mystery of Salvation: My Story of Doubt and Faith

By Amy Medina

On August 21, 2023

In Book Recommendations, Liberia, My Memoirs

I remember the indignation I felt over the miniature potted plant.

I was eight years old, and it was Sunday School at the big Baptist church on the hill. The fluorescent lights flickered as we squirmed in our metal folding chairs while the teacher asked us to raise our hands if we wanted to invite Jesus into our hearts. She reminded us that every head was bowed and every eye was closed because, apparently, this was a secret decision. We peeked behind fingers laced in front of our eyes.

A brown-haired girl was summoned behind the room divider and reappeared a few minutes later, surrounded by the approving gaze of the teachers. She seemed rather flippant for one who had just done something that required the rest of us to sit so solemnly with every-head-bowed-and-every-eye-closed.

I knew what had happened behind the room divider; the drill was familiar, even with only eight years under my belt. The teacher would have recited a prayer; the girl would have repeated it, and presto: Jesus was now in her heart.

When the brown-haired girl emerged, she was holding a fake miniature potted plant: a prize, presumably, for raising her hand. Jealously flamed. I loved anything miniature, and I briefly contemplated raising my hand too. Yet I was caught in a conundrum: I had learned that you could only ask Jesus into your heart once, and I had already done so with my mother when I was five years old, right next to the record player that sat under the dining room window. There was nothing I could do to get myself that prize. I wondered, should this decision even warrant a prize? The unfairness planted itself as a memory.

By 12, my faith had grown with my shoe size. In Liberia, I was incubated in an extraordinary community of multicultural Christians. Why wouldn’t I want to align myself with their God? Every night, I sat on my bed and read five chapters of the Bible, framed by the old-fashioned brown-flowered wallpaper in my bedroom. I went straight through until I got bogged down in Isaiah and skipped to the New Testament. I wrote little notes with goals for myself on how to improve in one fruit of the Spirit each month. I cried when I prayed for my unsaved family members.

I told my Dad I was ready to be baptized. In Liberia, the school gymnasium was also the church, representing the worst of times (P.E.) and the best of times (Psalty musicals). One Sunday, I stood outside that gymnasium while the cover was pulled off of the small concrete baptismal, and I stood in line in the red dust with several others. “Why do you want to be baptized?” the pastor asked me. “So that I can show the world I’m a Christian,” was my confident reply.

But yet, I had doubts. When did I actually become a Christian? I had no dramatic conversion story; I couldn’t remember not believing. So was my faith legitimate? What else did I need to do? Fear of being Left Behind permeated my generation. How could I be sure I was in?