Category: Other Page 31 of 180

When It All Blows Up In Your Face

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On September 1, 2016

In Other

Sixteen years ago, my husband and I were all of 24 years old when we arrived in Tanzania for our first term.  We had only been married nine months, and we were passionate and dedicated, but incredibly naïve.  We had absolutely no idea what we were in for.

We were working in youth ministry in a local church plant, and my husband was coaching sports as a way to get to know young people.  One young man came into our lives with a real interest in the gospel.  He was earnest and really seemed sincere, and it wasn’t long before he made a profession of faith.  Since he was from a religion that is usually opposed to Christianity, we were thrilled.

Over the next year and a half, this young man dominated our time and our prayer updates.  He was in our home almost every day.

Then, six weeks before we left the country, we found out he had been regularly stealing money from us.



We returned to the
States utterly shattered.  For many
other reasons, it had been an extremely difficult two years.  This young man had been a bright spot, and
when that blew up, we were completely demoralized and totally
disillusioned. 

By the grace of God, a couple years later we were back in
Tanzania, older, wiser, and a lot more wary. 
Yet even the loss of our naiveté didn’t really prepare us for everything
we would see and experience over the next ten years.  Like the ugly split of the indigenous church
we attended.  Or the married missionary
of multiple children who ran off with a woman from the village where he was
church planting.  Or that time when the national
leader who was raised up and supported by missionaries ended up being a
narcissist who abused his team.  And the
worst?  A local pastor—discipled, installed,
and supported by missionaries for over ten years—was discovered to have an
incestuous relationship with his adult daughter. 



Boom.  And just like that,
everything worked for, everything believed in, goes up in flames.

Though we weren’t intimately involved in any of those
situations, we were close enough to feel the shockwaves. And
they shook us to our core.

Disbelief. 
Despair.  Disillusionment.  We can handle the loneliness, the
inconveniences, and the bugs that come with missionary life, but not this.  Not this. Many missionaries would say that
they would rather be persecuted or deported than have their ministry blow up. How
could this have happened?  Where we did
go wrong?  Why are we even here?  What are we possibly going to tell our
supporters?  

Read the rest of this post over atA Life Overseas.  Don’t worry–there’s hope at the end!  

Starting Fifth Grade is a Big Deal for Both Grace and Her Mom

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On August 24, 2016

In Other

Grace and Miss Finocchi

My girl started fifth grade this week.  Fifth grade isn’t usually one of those landmark years, but for me, it is pretty significant.

Fifteen years ago, I came to Haven of Peace Academy to teach fifth grade.  It was 2001, and I walked into that same classroom.  I was 24 years old.  HOPAC was only six years old, and that classroom had just been built.  Cement dust was still all over the floor and not a single bulletin board was on the newly painted walls.

I was fighting my own internal battles as I prepared for that school year, many days barely coping.  But that class walked in on that first day, and we fell instantly in love.  After teaching in California, I was relieved to have a class that was not jaded by a culture that made them grow up too fast.  That classroom was my haven, and that class fed my soul.

When Narnia was being born, you could stick a hunk of metal in the ground and it would grow a lamppost.  Those days at HOPAC were the same.  The school was young and everything was new and we got the privilege of creating culture and tradition.  Some of the things my class did that year are still happening today, like Roman Day and the annual trip to the Amani rainforest.

I spent two years with that class, teaching them sixth grade as well as fifth, and many of those students have been a part of my life ever since.  Now fifteen years have gone by.

2002
2016

I watched them graduate from high school and I have celebrated their graduation from college.  They are now the age I was when I taught them.  They are my friends, and I think they teach me more than I taught them.  Many of them have returned to Tanzania to change their world.  In fact, Dorothy (center) leaves tomorrow to get her Masters in educational policy at Harvard, and then she’ll come back and transform education in Tanzania.

So yeah.  For my own girl, fifteen years later, to enter that very same fifth grade classroom?  Pretty darn cool.

The Grass is Always Greener in Arusha

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On August 21, 2016

In Other

Lauren and I have dreamed about Arusha for a long time.  We always knew that this northern Tanzanian city was in the region of Mount Kilimanjaro (home to where your Starbucks coffee is grown), the Great Serengeti (home to Simba), and is lush and green–at least 10 degrees cooler than Dar es Salaam.  As far as we were concerned, that made it a paradise.

So when the opportunity arose for all of us to attend Swahili language school in Arusha for three weeks, we jumped at the chance.  After all, we all needed to boost our Swahili, and a chance to spend time in Arusha would just be icing on the cake.

So we went.  We headed ten hours north on the two-lane road, buses and semi-trucks dodging us at breakneck speed.  We passed miles of sisal plantations and scrub brush savannah and villages of small mud houses.  We went with our long-time friends Ben and Lauren, and our new friends Luke and Amber, and a gaggle of nine kids under the age of ten.

Arusha did not disappoint us.  We stayed in guest cottages on a mission compound that is a version of Eden, where the chatter of monkeys woke us in the morning and the avocados dropped from heaven like manna.  The temperature dropped into the sixties and we shivered in our hoodies and bought thick socks at the market to wear at night.  We discovered that the grass really is greener in Arusha.

Of course, the bulk of every day, from 8:30 till 4, was spent on things like the seven noun classes of Swahili, and if you don’t know what a noun class is, then you can thank your lucky stars that English only has one.  Our heads worked hard and words words words sorted themselves into slots in our brains with labels like “causitive,” “stative,” and “passive.”

that gaggle of kids with their teachers
the kids’ Swahili classrooms

It was hard mental work, and we were exhausted many days.  But we were in such a beautiful place.  And we were with beautiful friends who are like family, and we ate meals together and the conversations were as nourishing as the food.  We walked the half hour to and from school every day, through corn fields and over streams and across a pasture of purple flowers.  The kids spent every afternoon roaring around on scooters and slept every night on a wooden loft, snuggled under blankets in the frigid sixty degree cold.

walking to school 

army ants!  don’t want to mess with those….

at a natural spring–that’s my boy flying high on the rope!

We had a good, good time.  But even though the grass is greener in Arusha, Dar es Salaam is home.  And there is always something sweet about that.

The Great Lie America Sent to Tanzania

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On August 10, 2016

In Other

I’m guessing that if I were to ask most of my readers if they are regular consumers of the preaching of Benny Hinn or Creflo Dollar, they would recoil in horror.  We change the station if they happen to appear on our televisions (or maybe watch out of morbid curiosity), but mostly, we do our best to try to distance ourselves from that kind of Christianity.  All that emphasis on wealth and health–they are not us.  

We just not might realize that the Prosperity Gospel is so tightly connected to the American Dream that many of us have no idea that we’ve accepted parts of it.  Those of us who wouldn’t have anything to do with Kenneth Copeland might still be willing to read The Prayer of Jabez or make Jeremiah 29:11 our “life verse.”  Even the very popular Hillsong has some veins in the Prosperity movement, as evidenced by its founder’s early book entitled, You Need More Money.  A Time magazine poll found that two-thirds of American Christians agreed that God wants people to prosper.

We shouldn’t be surprised then that Joel Osteen leads the largest church in America.  Or that the majority of mega-churches in America preach Prosperity.  Or that Prosperity preachers dominate the “Christian” airwaves, which means that this is the version of Christianity, more than any other, that gets spread to the rest of the world.

Including Tanzania.

As someone who is in Tanzania with the express purpose of training up church leaders to know, understand, and teach Scripture, it is difficult for me to express the depth of my distress in the Prosperity Gospel.  It is embedded everywhere.  And it came here from America.

Seen on thousands of cars in Tanzania

Of all the ugly things that America has exported, the Prosperity Gospel’s perversion of Christianity is one of the worst.  It was born and nurtured in America during a time of economic prosperity, so it was easy for millions of American Christians to swallow it down along with the American Dream.  And now….it’s here?  In a country that is one of the poorest in the world, with a life expectancy of 60?  Yet this “gospel” continues to tell people that if they just have enough faith, God will take away their poverty.  And if that doesn’t happen, well, then obviously they deserve it.  It’s nothing but a cruel joke from a God who obviously loves rich people more than them.

I once wrote that we joined Reach Tanzania because of Benny Hinn.  From our very first term in Tanzania in 2001, we realized that American televangelists are the primary source of influence on Tanzanian Christians, including many pastors.  Recently, I read the book Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel by Kate Bowler.   

It helped me understand American Christianity a whole lot better.  It helped me understand Tanzanian Christianity a whole lot better.  And it turned my stomach to realize that so many of the struggles in the Tanzanian church came directly from America.  


On the back of a Tanzanian city bus:  “Jesus is the winner”

Seen in a Tanzanian supermarket:  entire rack of books by Robert Schuller and Napoleon Hills

It’s time, Americans.

It’s time for this lie to end.  It’s time for all of us to remember that God does not owe us the American dream. It’s time for us to apply all of Scripture, including the parts that guarantee persecution and trouble on this side of heaven.  Including the parts where God does not always give us what we ask for.  Including the parts where He is a God who allows (even creates!) prosperity and disaster (Is. 45:7), where both can be a part of His will, and where He intentionally, in wisdom and grace, uses suffering in the lives of His people.  That God can heal, but sometimes He chooses not to.  That God wants us to be holy more than He wants us to be healthy.  That God wants us to love Him more than we love His gifts.  That knowing Him, and being known by Him, is the greatest treasure in the universe.  

For the American church, I am praying that this decent into chaos will knock some sense into its delusions of what God owes them.  For Tanzania, I am praying for an African Martin Luther.  A man (or many of them) of godly strength and humility who has the courage and the position to lead his people away from the lies that America sent them.  May God help us all.

Medina Life, July

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On August 4, 2016

In Other

The biggest news of the month is that Johnny’s adoption was officially finalized on July 27th!  He is pictured here with his faithful social worker, who deserves our heartfelt appreciation.  I doubt we would have a fourth child right now if it was not for him. 

Johnny had no idea why “going to court” was such a big deal, since he had already decided that he wanted to stay with us, so as far as he was concerned, it was already a done deal.  Instead, his biggest accomplishment was completing his first 100 piece puzzle all by himself.  I know, I know, we need to find some non-princess puzzles.  

Since everyone was out of school this month (except for Gil, who was still preparing and teaching some training sessions), the three older siblings decided that Johnny needed some pre-school.  So they created an entire curriculum, complete with recess, ICT (computer class), report cards, and a very detailed teaching schedule.  Poor Johnny didn’t know what hit him.  
We had some excitement when a friend, who is a student in our program, asked us to take his wife to the hospital when she went into labor.  The call came on a Sunday morning, just as we were leaving for church, so we picked them up, dropped them off at the hospital, and went to church.  The baby was born at 1:30 pm, and then we got the call that mama and baby would be discharged at 4:00 pm.  Ummm….okay!  Our kids got the crazy (but awesome!) experience of riding in the car with a woman in labor, and then taking her back home with the baby only six hours later. 
Just in case this all seems a bit too idyllic, know that there was also a lot of this going on this month.
Spending time with one of our favorite-ever families, who go back as far as 2002 and our first term in Tanzania.
Spending time with the “Moja Mission” team who have an incredible ministry to Tanzanian teenagers, and also all happen to be studying in our program.
My latest post over at A Life Overseas is about the balancing act of educating kids overseas.  If MK education is a part of your life, or you know someone who would benefit from this discussion, please head them over to this post!  

As of August 1st, our whole family is now ten hours away from home, at a Swahili language school.  We are here for three weeks, all of us working intensely to improve our Swahili skills.  Since we’re gone from 8 till 5 every day, and have homework on top of that, my posts will be sparse this month.  That is, unless you want lessons on conjugating Swahili verbs….since that’s pretty much all that’s on my mind right now.  But don’t worry….I’ll be back!    

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