Tag: America and Worldview Page 1 of 9

I Want to Need You

On September 21, 2023

I bonded with Mark and Jan when I called them ten days after arriving in Tanzania because I had a panic attack. I became friends with Prakash and Harsha when they invited Gil and me to sleep at their house that night.

Carol showed me how to grocery shop in a new country. I got to know Alyssa during her long hours combing lice out of my hair. Everest became an extension of our family during the years he fixed our plumbing, electricity, and immigration problems. We called Dan and Janet when Gil broke out in a sudden, high fever. Janelle and I became friends while being stranded by the old school car multiple times. Lucy and I shared our life stories while she patiently stretched my Swahili skills.

When thrust into a country where I had no extended family, didn’t speak the language, and had to learn new ways of surviving, I had to throw myself at the mercy of others. Yes, it was humiliating to be so dependent, but I didn’t have a choice. And when I got my feet under me and other new people arrived, they turned to me for a lifeline – and it was fulfilling and gratifying to help. Bonds formed quickly, deeply, permanently.

These weren’t just friendships based on casual, common interests. They were relationships built on necessity and desperation, forming an intricate web of the sorrows and joys of daily life.

When we relocated to a brand new city in California three years ago, I found myself frustrated that it took so long to make friends and feel like I was part of a community. In Tanzania, it had happened almost instantaneously. What was different? It slowly dawned on me: In America, I didn’t need to depend on anyone.

How Do I Live As a Christian in America?

By amy.medina

On February 1, 2023

In Book Recommendations, How Americans Think, What I'm Learning

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.

So you could say that Jake Meador’s What Are Christians For? Life Together at the End of the World made a notable impact on me. My husband will probably secretly tell you he’s sick of me talking about it.

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.

Does God Want Us to Fight For Our Freedom?

By Amy Medina

On February 16, 2022

In Fear, How Americans Think, Living Like a Missionary

Early in our marriage, Gil casually mentioned that he wasn’t sure he would have been on the side of the Patriots in the Revolutionary War.

I wondered if I had married some kind of Benedict Arnold. Movies, songs, and Christian school ingrained in me that Patriots were on God’s side – they were the good guys, the heroes. The Loyalists were filthy rotten traitors who had no right to call themselves American, let alone Christian.

But Gil has always been one to question the status quo; it drives me crazy, but that’s part of why I fell in love with him. He explained that he is deeply grateful for American freedoms, and he is not necessarily a pacifist. He simply doesn’t know if “taxation without representation” was a biblical reason to go to war.

That’s my Gil; he always has to bring the Bible into it. I wish it was easier to ignore him.

(If you’re wondering if I am heading into the realm of crazy talk, please, don’t deport me yet. Hang in there with me.)

I sense a pervasive worldview among Americans: God wants us to fight for our freedom. Let your memory roll through American history – the wars, the invasions, the protests, the marches. Americans believe that fighting for freedom is a God-ordained right….even a responsibility.

But is this biblical truth?

Ironically, first-century Jews expected Jesus to be their George Washington, leading them in their own Revolutionary War. The oppression they experienced under Rome went far beyond unfair taxation. Jesus’ disciples waited with bated breath for the moment when he would call them to arms to overpower the Romans.

Except, he never did.

My Authentic Self Does Not Like Ticks

By Amy Medina

On July 14, 2021

In How Americans Think, Life in Tanzania

Last week I told my cousin about our year in Tanzania infamously called the War of the Ticks. It was so nightmarish that every day I pulled 25 of them off my tiny dog and I stopped even trying with our big dog and they had infested my kitchen and we rarely let the dogs in the house anymore but the ticks kept crawling in under the door anyway.

We paid the children money for the number of ticks they killed and so there were always cups of water sitting around with dead ticks drowned in them by my children. Drowning did not always work though, because ticks would go through the washing machine cycle and come out alive. I became an expert at beheading them with a fingernail. Sometimes the engorged ones would fall off the dogs and burst open which meant the live ticks would crawl through the dog blood and leave their tiny tracks on the floor.

When I found ticks in my daughter’s bed, we contemplated putting the dogs down. We had tried every tick prevention we could find, and until a friend of a friend sent us magical tick pills which killed them all in 24 hours, that year felt like some sort of creepy tick hell.

Analyzing My Allegiance

By Amy Medina

On April 19, 2021

In How Americans Think

There are two things I remember about chapel in third grade at my Christian school in California.

First, I remember the enormous, wall-sized, stained glass window of Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus hovered over us as we sang “Whose side are you leaning on?” in the padded pews.

Second, I remember we started every chapel by pledging allegiance to the American flag and the Christian flag. In that order.

I never questioned this exercise, of course, as kids never do. And after all, I was leaning on the Lord’s side. And after all, I didn’t want to mess around with wall-sized Jesus.

But as I think back on this routine, now I have questions. Why, at our Christian school, did we put our hands over our hearts and pledge allegiance to a country? This regimen is actually pretty unusual among democratic countries. Isn’t that something that children are required to do in, say, communist countries? In fact, don’t we teach children to celebrate the biblical heroes who refused to “pledge allegiance” to government powers?

And, why did we always pledge allegiance to the American flag (and to the Republic for which it stands) first and pledge allegiance to the Christian flag (and to the Savior for which it stands) second? Doesn’t that subtly communicate a certain set of priorities?

Things that make you go hmmm.