Tag: America and Worldview Page 3 of 9

Still Looking for That Better Country

On December 21, 2019

I’ve been a foreigner for so long that I’ve forgotten what it feels like to live as a citizen.

It’s now normal for me to stick out in a crowd, to get gawks, stares. Every two years, I apply for expensive visas for permission to live in Tanzania. Even though I’ve lived here sixteen years, I’ve never voted in a Tanzanian election, or even felt like I have a right to a political opinion. I’ve never owned a house. I know that just about everything I own will one day be owned by someone else, so I better not get attached to it. I have the uncomfortable feeling that some of those around me are in awe of my foreignness and unnecessarily defer to me, but others resent my very presence in their country.

Either way, I am an outsider.

It’s become so normal that sometimes I forget how exhausting it is to live as a foreigner. It’s like playing a card game, every day, where you keep discovering new rules that everyone understands except you. Just when you think you’ve finally got it all figured out–surprise! You don’t. And you find yourself feeling like a two-year-old or a hard-hearted wretch or just a plain idiot.

As I think about the new life ahead of me–living as a citizen in a country that technically is my own, sometimes I’m terrified; sometimes I’m grief-stricken, but other times I’m excited. Yes, my relationship with America is complicated, but the lure of the American dream is strong. We can settle down and put down roots. Maybe for the first time in my life, I can own a house! I can plant trees and watch them grow with my children. I won’t have to worry about visas anymore. I won’t stand out in a crowd.

As much as I love living overseas, there’s a part of me that aches for permanency, normalcy, security. They are feelings I have stuffed down and suppressed for most of my adult life. Now that there’s a possibility of fulfilling them, they have risen to the surface.

I never realized how much I longed for a homeland until it was finally at my fingertips.

The appeal is strong. Which is exactly why I must push back against that feeling and remind myself that America was never meant to be my homeland. I can’t put my hope in a country–even the richest, most powerful country in the world.

I could buy a house, and it could burn down. I could put down roots, and then lose a job. I could save for kids’ college, and the economy could collapse. I could fit in–but as a Christ-follower, am I supposed to?

If I give into the temptation of allowing America to feel too much like home, to become comfortable, secure, rooted, then what happens when obeying God challenges that comfort? What happens when I need to stand for something that might sacrifice the personal kingdom I built for myself?

And haven’t I always said, all these years, that one of the best parts of living overseas is how it reminds me that my real home is in heaven? So why would I want to give in to a desire that tells me my home is in America?

In the most famous biblical chapter on faith, there’s a key line: The Faithful didn’t get the homeland they longed for. They did not receive what was promised.

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.

Kind of flies in the face of the American dream, doesn’t it? The people in Hebrews 11 are our pillars of faith, yet they did not receive what was promised. They were strangers, exiles, nomads. They recognized that their homeland was not on this earth.

Those who never found a home on this earth are celebrated as our faith-heroes.

There’s no reason why God would want me to feel at home in this world. I keep craving it; I pursue it; seek after it….but it’s a misplaced longing. In fact, if I do feel too much at home, then something is wrong. Because that desire was never meant to be fulfilled on this side of eternity.

Which is why, even in America, I will need to remind myself tokeep living like a missionary.

Of course, it won’t be wrong for me to buy a house and plant trees, or vote, or teach my children the Pledge of Allegiance. I just must be careful to remember where my true allegiance lies. Because my home will never be found on this earth.

Deepest, Darkest, Dangerous….America

By Amy Medina

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.

Dear America, You and I Have a Complicated Relationship

By Amy Medina

On August 5, 2019

In Other

Dear America,

You and I have a complicated relationship.

You gave me my citizenship when I was born. In fact, my dad was serving at an army base when I arrived one freezing winter day in New Jersey. My passport is American navy blue. I belong to you, whether I like it or not.

Yet for over half my life, I’ve lived in other countries. Pieces of those places have latched themselves onto me. I’ve never wholly and completely been one of your own, which has left me feeling like an outsider. But like the astronauts who have the privilege of seeing our planet as a small blue marble, I’ve had the privilege of seeing you, for many years, from the outside. A different perspective is always a privilege.

Back when I was younger and much more of a black-and-white thinker, I have to admit that mostly I was just critical of you. I focused only on your negatives, and other countries seemed much more unique and interesting. So even while I reaped enormous benefits from belonging to you, I distanced my identity away from you. But now that I’m older and wiser? Well, how I feel about you is much more complicated.

We’re visiting America this summer, and the other night, we were driving up a windy stretch of mountain highway, and the traffic stopped dead. We could tell that just around the bend ahead, a bad accident had happened. But as we sat and waited behind the thousands of other brake lights impatiently twinkling in the night, a looming light appeared in the sky. And we watched, in awe, as a helicopter circled slowly and then landed. It was only fifteen minutes later that it rose into the air again and the traffic started moving.

And I thought, This is why America is amazing.

Then I thought, That’s a new perspective for me.

I’ve always been critical of your consumerism and hoarding, your ability to produce so much junk that even developing countries don’t want the excess. Yet I also see your capitalism and how it has brought an unprecedented standard of living to millions of people, and I want that for other countries too.

I despair over your debauchery–you fuel a massive, perverse online industry that exploits women and children, college campuses that are nothing but one big party, and sexuality that has hijacked how we define identity. Yet I see your freedom–to own property, to start churches, to send your daughters to college, even to publicly criticize your president–freedom that most in the world don’t even dream of. And I realize that this freedom is inextricably connected to allowing people to make bad choices.

I hate that I have to tell my 11-year-old African son that when he is in America, he can’t put up his hoodie in public. I hate that I have to explain to him why. Yet, I love that I could take my daughter (who happens to be an American immigrant) to the brilliant musical Hamilton and she could see a stage full of actors portraying the Founding Fathers–and who share her skin tone.

I love how you are one nation made up of people from many nations, a country founded on ideals, not ethnic groups. Yet sometimes it remains an ideal, not a reality, as fear and complacency keep neighborhoods and churches in their own separate corners. But other times, it doesn’t, and that gives me hope.

I used to view your suburbs with disdain, with their soul-sucking uniformity and monotony. Now I see how those neat little lines of houses represent a miracle in human history–millions of ordinary people living with plumbing, electricity, security, independence. How easy it is for me to forget how I benefited from that “ordinary” life–riding bikes around my parents’ cozy cul-de-sac without any worry that I might not eat that night, or that soldiers might come and burn it all down.

It’s easy to crave adventure and uniqueness from within the safe confines of that blue American passport. Yes, I love living overseas, and it is a privilege. But you know what I’ve realized? It’s even more of a privilege to enjoy the benefits of being American while living overseas.

And that humbles me. It makes me less critical and more thankful.

You, my country, are complicated. But so is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a fallen world.

What Did I Ever Do to Deserve This Blue Passport?

By Amy Medina

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.

Those Who Suffer Are My Teachers

By Amy Medina

On May 1, 2019

In Other

I’ve always been ambivalent about Santa and the Easter Bunny.

I probably would feel that way anywhere we lived, but I especially would never be able to pull off those stories in Tanzania. I can’t bring myself tell my children that a magical old man or giant bunny is leaving them gifts when they see children every day who are living in poverty. How could I ever explain to them that Santa only leaves gifts for them, but not for their neighbors? How would I excuse the Easter bunny’s negligence of the little girl begging at our car window on the way to church?

I must hold my theology of God to the same standard.

Living as an American in a developing country has forced me to wrestle hard with what I believe. Am I believing an American gospel? Or the actual gospel?

Even though it’s easy for me to disdain the misuse of Jeremiah 29:11, how many times have I caught myself thinking, God would never let that terrible thing happen to me? How often have I needed to remind myself, God doesn’t owe me the American dream?

I’m embarrassed to admit the number of times I have wallowed in self-pity, asking God, Why me? Or how often have I realized that lurking around in the back of my mind is the notion that God just wants me to be happy?

Theology that can’t transcend culture, time, and experience isn’t Truth at all.

If what I believe is true, then it must be true for the Christians of Mozambique who lost everything in one cyclone–home, business, community–only to be hit by another a few weeks later. It’s got to be true for the Christian in Sri Lanka who simultaneously lost his wife and three children in a terrorist attack.

How dare I think that God owes me anything? I shouldn’t be asking Why me? but rather Why not me?

Of course, it’s not just those in developing countries who suffer. I think of Scott and Johanna Watkins, who discovered shortly after their marriage that Johanna had developed life-threatening allergies to just about everything, including Scott. Or Grace Utomo, who was an extraordinarily talented violinist when she was hit by a car at 23 years old. She now suffers from multiple seizures a day and can hardly ever leave the house.

Can I think about the lives of these suffering souls and believe that God just wants me to be happy? When I worry about the future, should I assure myself that God would never let that happen to me when he has already allowed much worse to happen to others who bear his name?

Ironically, the Bible speaks far more about oppression, injustice, and suffering than it does about happiness. Persecution is an expectation. We tend to forget that Paul wrote Rejoice in the Lord always while he was languishing in prison. There is no fear of contradiction between the gospel of Jesus and the reality of suffering. Which means that the problem lies in my own assumptions, not in the Bible.

I have learned to pay attention to those who suffer and yet remain steadfast in their faith. When my friend Lucy’s house was marked for demolition, she told me, “God gives and takes away. We will bless the name of the Lord, no matter what happens.”

Grace Utomo asks, Can I really call God ‘kind?’ and answers, “We would have no idea of how faithful and valuable God really is if we never knew loss in some capacity. We have souls that live forever, but our physical conditions are only temporary. Our job is to cling to eternity, and to the hope that we will enjoy God most fully at the end of our earthly life. Until then, we have the beautiful (albeit sometimes painful) opportunity to know God as a faithful refuge. If we look beyond the temporary, God is indeed kind.”

Scott Waktins writes, “Seeing upheavals so commonly in the scriptures reminds me that not only are Johanna and I in good company, but that it is serving a greater purpose. These difficult circumstances we are going through are not a cosmic accident. They are serving a purpose I don’t fully see, but one that I believe will lead to good. The upheaval of the past years has not upheaved my relationship with God. Instead, it has helped me deeply appreciate the upheaval of Jesus’ life and its lasting impact on the world.”

I am not worthy to stand in the presence of these suffering saints. They are my teachers. Theirs is the theology I seek.