Tag: Thoughts on Missions Page 4 of 13

“I heard you are going to the clinic today,” I texted my friend Alyssa. “Would you mind taking in my kid’s urine sample?”

“Sure,” she texted back. And then we tried to figure out how to get it to her.

“Oh! Mark’s at the bakery with his prayer group,” she remembered. “Just take it to him there.”

This is when you know you’ve hit the level of BFF: You can hand a man bag of pee at the bakery with his prayer group and feel no shame.

****

By the time our lives crossed with Mark and Alyssa Dunker and Ben and Lauren Snyder, it was about six years into our Tanzanian life, and Gil and I were friend-weary. Both couples, in fact, had contributed to that–they had come into our lives for about a year, and then left. Like so many before them; like so many would after.

But the Dunkers and the Snyders were different, because even though we assumed we would never see them again, they came back to Tanzania. We still had our guard up, though. Friendships between missionaries can go deep and strong in a short amount of time, but they tend to not last very long. Best not to get too attached.

But life just kept throwing the six of us together.

Being part of Reach Global, that made us automatic “family.” The unwritten rules of missionary culture state that mission teammates stick together. You might have barely met these people, but they’re the first ones you ask when you need someone to watch your kids. There’s an assumption you’ll get invited for holiday dinners. When you can’t figure out how to debone a chicken or get a driver’s license or kill the ticks on your dog, they are the first ones you call. You know, like family. Except in a desperate, lonely, out-of-options sort of way. You don’t really have a choice. You either depend on these people, or die.

But with the Dunkers and the Snyders, our relationships became more than mission family. Because of Haven of Peace Academy and Reach Tanzania Bible School, our lives started overlapping and boomeranging back on themselves. The paths of our lives became a mega-highway, intersecting and crossing and merging all into one.

****

Think about all of your various friends. You’ve got your church friends, and your Bible study friends. There’s your work friends, and your soccer mom friends. There’s your friends who are the parents of your kids’ friends, and your community friends, who you keep running into in the grocery store or the local pool.

Now imagine you have a friend who falls into every category. Every single one. And then imagine that you just happen to be living in a foreign country with that friend.

You get the idea.

****

We were at Ben and Lauren’s house when Josiah took his first steps. Lauren and I planned Haven of Peace Academy’s first graduation ceremony together. The four of us shared a common love for HOPAC, and a common passion to see it get bigger, better, see its impact increase. Lauren served as school counselor, Gil as chaplain, and Ben quickly climbed from math teacher to director. I joined the board of directors for several years, then Ben and his team hired me as elementary principal.

I drove Mark and Alyssa around Dar es Salaam their first week, and I was with them when they bought their car. Alyssa and I bonded when she spent hours picking lice out of my hair. They came to Tanzania to train pastors, which, besides HOPAC, was our other passion. So when Gil decided it was time to leave HOPAC and start training pastors, we now had a reason to stay in Tanzania.The Dunkers had started a Bible school, and we enthusiastically joined in.

We grew together with the Snyders by building Haven of Peace Academy. We grew together with the Dunkers by building Reach Tanzania Bible School. Somewhere along the way it became the six of us. Sure, we had common interests–missions, adoption, politics, theology, culture–but I think it was common life more than common interests that brought us together.

It’s now been ten years. These ten years have not been easy on any of our three families–at many times bordering on tragic. At first we relied on each other because it just made sense–these were the people closest to us. But go through that enough times, and one day you realize that you really know these people. And they really know you, and they still like you. And you think, Wow, this is something really special.

In tangible ways, but also in very real emotional and spiritual ways, they kept us here. We kept them here.

****

Have you ever been in an emotionally intense situation–a short-term missions trip or a week-long camp, where you didn’t know anybody but formed deep friendships quickly? There is something about being away from home together, living in close quarters and experiencing intense emotions together that bonds people for life.

Now take that kind of experience and multiply it by five hundred.

****

I sit here in my quiet living room and watch the darkening sky, listening to the crows bidding goodnight and the crickets waking up. This small space, with the weird pink tiled floor and the couches we could never make very comfortable, is alive with memories.

I see the Christmases. The plastic gangly tree in the corner, the stockings strung across the window, the stale smell of air conditioning pushing out the stifling heat seeking to consume us. Many are here in the room, many we love and consider family, but they come and go during different years like Ebenezer’s ghosts. But the Dunkers and the Snyders, they are the constant. They are here every year.

I see Friday nights with my floor strewn with popcorn and my throw pillows with holes in them and the sweat stains on my couch from dozens of teenagers. Ben and Lauren are here in the midst of them, Ben and Gil playing basketball with the boys outside the window, the girls chatting with Lauren and me. Sometimes the power goes out. And we sit here in the dark and laugh hysterically and sweat even more.

I see Lauren and me on one of those Friday nights, sitting in that corner on the weird pink tile floor, the swirl of teenagers laughing around us, while I tell her about my trip to see Lily. And about another little girl named Zawadi, who also needed a family.

I see Alyssa and Lauren and I, all three of us on the well-worn carpet, weeping in prayer over Zawadi. Weeks and months and years.

I see movies projected on the wall while my kids snuggle in with Aunt Alyssa or Uncle Ben. And finally, Zawadi is there too.

I see the Medina and Snyder and Dunker kids sitting on that tile floor with their striped melamine plates filled with homemade pizza. Don’t sit on the carpet! I holler every time. They don’t. They know better. Because I say it every time.

****

There was also the traveling.

We went all over Tanzania together–for language school, for vacation, for HOPAC trips–to Zanzibar, Moshi, Lushoto, Kigomboni, Arusha. And then out of the country–Kenya, South Africa, even Slovenia.

It wasn’t always all six of us, and it was rarely just the six of us, but again, the Snyders and the Dunkers and Medinas were the common denominator. Together we navigated airports and taxis and foreign languages. We caravanned in our mini-vans and would stop on the side of the road for kids to pee. We would always send each other text messages about speed traps.

We took students to camp and on spiritual retreats, sports weekends and senior trips. We went to mission conferences and HOPAC conferences. We went to the mountains for the week after Christmas–every single year.

We sat around beach campfires and laughed about ridiculous inside jokes. The guys played board games for seemingly every waking hour. We prayed and played with students side by side. We explored other missionary schools together, collecting ideas that led to passionate conversations late into the night, planning together how to make our school better.

Every place, every drive, every airport, we wracked up more memories. Sometimes bad ones, most of them good.

****

Their friendships snuck up on me.

I was so used to holding loosely to missionary friendships that at first I didn’t even recognize the bonds, thin as gossamer webs, slowly beginning to pull us together. Events that seem insignificant, if there are enough of them, one day start becoming quite significant indeed. Building memories, after enough time, becomes building history.

And one day, several years ago, I woke up and realized that the Snyders and the Dunkers and the Medinas weren’t just family. When you work and play and grow and cry alongside each other, for so many years, the description is closer to siblings than anything else.

The day I came to that realization was also the day I began to grieve. I was in deep; I was past the point of no return. What we had was quite extraordinary, but what we had would never last. When you move overseas, there should be flashing red lights around a huge sign that reads, “Beware: Make friendships at your own risk. They will be amazing, but they will break your heart.”

But it will be the happiest kind of sadness.

****

It didn’t matter how many ways that our roads had intersected. At some point, we always knew they would diverge. None of us belong to this country. It would be just a matter of time before those paths would start going in opposite directions. The Snyders are leaving Tanzania. It’s the end of an era.

Of course, the friendship won’t end; that would be inconceivable. But it won’t ever be the same.

So I am grieving. I guess I always have been. That’s the danger of loving something or someone too much in this overseas life. I guess that’s the danger of loving anything in this fleeting life. There is no constant. There is no permanency. Not on this side of the veil, anyway.

But we do sometimes get glimpses of eternity in this fleeting life–a perfect sunset, delicious ice cream, a belly-laugh with a spouse or child, a resonant symphony. Extraordinary friendship fits into that category. What’s temporary now will one day be forever. And it will be glorious. How grateful I am to have had that glimpse.

Lily’s “Support Tree” in first grade: Mom, Dad, Uncle Ben, Aunt Lauren, Uncle Mark, Aunt Alyssa

What to Know Before You Go

By Amy Medina

On May 9, 2019

In Other

Let’s say you are boarding a transatlantic flight and hear, “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen; this is your pilot speaking. I’m 21 years old, and I’m excited to tell you that this is my first commercial flight! But don’t you worry; I’ve flown my Daddy’s crop duster at least a half dozen times. What I don’t have in experience or education, I make up with passion. I’m just about as willing as they come; my heart is practically bursting with willingness! Now buckle up your seatbelts; we’ll be off as soon as I find that user’s manual.”

I don’t know about you, but I’d be out of that plane faster than a fried egg off a Teflon pan.

Yet sometimes we approach missions in the same way. Willing hearts filled with passion are awesome, but they are not enough. So here’s where things get awkward: I’ve titled this “What to Know Before You Go,” when actually it should be more like, “What I Wish I Had Known Before I Went.” Because when I got on a plane to Tanzania almost twenty years ago, I was just about as bad as that pilot. Thankfully I didn’t completely crash and burn, but I learned the hard way, over and over again. Had I taken the time early on to do a little more study and a lot more wrestling, I could have spared myself a lot of grief, and certainly increased my effectiveness in those early years. Learn from my mistakes.

1. You need to have a basic understanding of worldviews.

This goes much deeper than a knowledge of world religions. For example, a person can call himself a Christian, but that doesn’t mean that his thinking, choices, and actions line up with the Bible. The same is true for those who follow other faiths. The religious labels people give themselves just scratch the surface of what they really believe. This is where a study of worldview comes in. If you are hoping to live, work, and have a gospel-impact on people of a different culture, that’s got to start with understanding their worldview–and your own.

Darrow Miller’s Discipling Nations: The Power of Truth to Transform Cultures should be required reading for any new missionary.

2. You need to know how to interpret the Bible on your own.

Most new missionaries have been nurtured in spiritually rich environments–strong Christian colleges and solid churches that often include discipleship, biblical teaching, and small groups. This is wonderful–but what happens when you end up in a city where there are no strong churches? Or those that do exist are in another language? What happens when you find yourself in a spiritually harsh environment with only a small team of other believers who can help you stay afloat?

Online sermons can help. Rich Christian literature can help. But at the end of the day, it’s going to be you and your Bible. Do you have the skills you need to interpret it without a pastor or small group leader’s help? Do you know enough about the various genres of Scripture, the historical context, and sound interpretation practices so that you can be confident of what it’s really saying?

The technical word for this is “hermeneutics,” or Bible study methods. Our family favorite is Living by the Book: The Art and Science of Reading the Bible by Howard Hendricks, but there are many other great resources out there.

3. You need to have worked out a biblical theology of suffering–or at least started to.

Of course, suffering can be found on every corner of the globe, in every social sphere. But any ministry that takes you up close and personal with the messiness of people’s lives, especially amongst the poor and disadvantaged, has the possibility of knocking you breathless with the depth of the suffering you will witness.

What will it do to your soul to see the blind child begging on the street corner? To be friends with the woman who lost her twins due to an unconscionable doctor’s error? To see the little albino boy whose arm was chopped off for witchcraft purposes….by his own uncle? If you haven’t already wrestled with God over the reality of suffering and the problem of evil, you may risk disillusionment, burn-out, or even losing your faith.

Jerry Bridges’ Trusting God: Even When Life Hurts has had a profound influence on my life on this topic.

4. You need to know the theology of poverty alleviation.

What do you do about the beggars on the street corner? Or the constant requests by your neighbors for loans or favors? How do you assuage your guilty conscience when you go out to dinner or spend money on a vacation, knowing that people around you are hungry? Guilt will slowly strangle you unless you have already thought through how you will respond.

A theology of suffering answers, “How can God allow this?” A theology of poverty alleviation answers, “How should I respond?”

If you haven’t yet read When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor….and Yourself, now is the time. It’s an absolute must-read for any missionary (or any Christian, for that matter).

5. You need to know the history of your host country.

Are you able to identify the five most important events in your host country’s history? Do you know how the government is structured? Are you familiar with the nation’s holidays and why they are celebrated? What is every child taught? If you want to get to the soul of a people, then you must understand where they came from. Take the time find out.

All of these areas can be learned by dedicated study on your own. I learn best by reading, so I’ve given my recommendations for my favorite books. But I’m sure there are audiobooks, podcasts, or videos on all of these subjects. If you’ve got other suggestions, please share! Utilize the massive amount of internet resources at our fingertips, and educate yourself on these important issues–ideally, before you go.

This was originally posted at A Life Overseas.

When You’re Sharing Jesus as an Outsider

By Amy Medina

On April 13, 2019

In Other

Gil and I hadn’t been in Tanzania very long before we made our first whopper of a cultural mistake.

We had been investing deeply in the life of an Indian young woman who was with us several times a week. She had a rather harsh mother who, we felt, was giving her daughter unrealistic boundaries and unnecessary expectations. Wanting to help our friend, we approached her mother with our advice. “It’s not okay how you are treating your daughter,” we said firmly. “She is eighteen years old, so she is an adult. She can make her own decisions.”

And the mother responded humbly to our 25-year-old, American wisdom and graciously thanked us for enlightening her on how to parent her child. And we all lived happily ever after. The end.

Um, no. We alienated the mother, caused a deeper divide between her and her daughter, and learned a very hard lesson: Culture and worldview matter. In Indian culture, it is unthinkable to consider an 18-year-old unmarried girl to be either an adult or independent from her parents’ authority, no matter how harsh their expectations might be.

And so began our journey into learning how much we did not know about trying to share the love of Jesus in another culture.

Since America’s inception, Christians didn’t need to worry about this. Cross-cultural missions was out there–not right here. Okay, so maybe they thought about it when it came to first-generation immigrants. Maybe a church would offer a seminar on “How to Reach Your Muslim Neighbor.”

I’m not saying that American churches weren’t concerned about evangelism; my point is that evangelism of middle-class America was not seen as cross-cultural. Sure, there were plenty of non-Christians out there, but we could assume that they shared many of our core beliefs. We had a starting point of agreement: There’s a God, He has established right and wrong, and the Bible holds some degree of authority.

And even once most people started abandoning those beliefs, we all still shared a worldview that came from the Bible, whether we were Christians or not: There is an inherent purpose and order to the universe. We can trust our senses. Biology matters. If you’re a human, you’re a person. Marriage and family is the bedrock of a society. Moral standards are absolute, even if we might argue over specifics.

But we can no longer assume agreement about these things. Which means that even if you look the same and speak the same language and are living side by side with your middle class, white American neighbors, if you’re a Christian, you are now a cross-cultural missionary. Effective evangelism in America requires that you understand a different worldview.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong to keep fighting for change at the government level–after all, since America is a government of “we the people,” we have a responsibility to work towards a government that we believe is best for society. But we’re not going to change hearts by changing laws.

And if we want to change hearts, we’ve got to understand them first. One of the first things missionaries are told at orientation is that People have a reason for what they do. On the outside, people’s actions might look really stupid or foolish to us, but dig a little deeper, and there’s a reason there. Even behind horrendous traditions such as female genital mutilation or child marriage or albino murders, there’s always logic there. So if you come into a foreign culture with guns blazing, forcefully proclaiming that these are wrong, terrible things, you will lose your audience immediately. Missionaries have learned this the hard way for centuries.

That doesn’t mean that we accept these practices as “cultural” and don’t do anything about them. But it does mean that we spend time–a lot of time–trying to understand where these ideas come from, and get deep into what motivates culture. Because real change comes from the worldview level.

As American Christians become outsiders in their own country, I can’t help but wonder if they have the same lessons to learn as cross-cultural missionaries. As I watch from a distance, I see lots of Christians getting really afraid or really angry, because they feel like they are losing their country. Maybe they are. But what American Christians need to remember is that the “Christian culture” in their country for the last two hundred years has been an anomaly in world history. It shouldn’t be an expectation.

American Christians, you might need to start living like missionaries. And among other things, this means that in order to be effective in evangelism, we’ve got to start by truly understanding the prevailing worldview in our culture. Instead of just frantically trying to put out the fires of abortion and sexuality and re-defined family, we’ve got to understand what’s motivating these cultural changes. And that’s going to require a study of worldview.

Do we know why we believe what we believe? Christians have often said, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

And the clouds parted and the sun rose in glory behind the open Bible, and all God’s people said “Amen!”

And everyone else stopped listening.

We need a different kind of conversation. Do we know the worldview behind what our neighbors believe? Do we know the worldview behind what we believe?

What is our ultimate source of Truth?

What determines reality?

What is a human? What is a person? What determines our identity?

What is the ultimate purpose in life?

What is the role of a family in a society and what makes the concept of “family” so important?

How do we draw the line between right and wrong?

Why are things so screwed up, and what needs to happen to fix them?

We should be asking these questions. Can we answer them for ourselves? Can we understand how others would answer them…and why?

Nancy Pearcey is my favorite author, and worldview is her favorite subject. But it shouldn’t be reserved for college philosophy courses–this is stuff every Christian needs to know. Every child needs to learn. If we want to be effective evangelists in our culture, then we must understand worldview. Welcome to the world of cross-cultural missions.

Start here: Finding Truth by Nancy Pearcey (right now only 99 cents!)

Love Thy Body by Nancy Pearcey

Know of some other good resources on this subject? Share them with us!

When You Want to Want to Stay Longer

By Amy Medina

On April 11, 2019

In Other

When living overseas, sometimes there’s no doubt that you need to leave. A denied visa, a medical emergency, a government coup, a burn-out, an unresolvable conflict.

Sometimes there’s no doubt you want to stay. You’ve adapted; you’ve found community, ministry, purpose, and most of the time, you’re loving life.

But what about when you think you should stay, but you really don’t want to?

When the need is great, and right now, you’re the best person to fill it. When you’ve received affirmation from local believers and leadership from home that you are a good fit for your role. When you are seeing fruit–or you can almost see it, just over the horizon.

But you are weary of this life. You are sick and tired of the long lines at government offices, of bugs in your kitchen drawers, of being misunderstood (again). The pollution aggravates your daughter’s asthma, and it takes you five hours to run one errand, and suddenly the price of milk doubles over night. Again.

And your old life is looking pretty great. Your friends’ lives on Instagram are looking even better.

You don’t really want to stay. But you’re pretty sure you should. You want to want to stay. How do you get there?

Maybe sometimes you just need a vacation. Or some counseling. Maybe you need to consider a new neighborhood. Maybe you just need to bite the bullet and buy that air conditioner.

But after fifteen years living overseas, do you want to know what has kept me here longer? Changing my perspective from This is an experience to This is my life.

What’s the difference?

An experience is temporary. It’s something that you check off your bucket list before going back to your “normal” life. You’re likely to expect fun and adventure. You’re likely to have high expectations of what you’re going to get out of it, and lower lows when you don’t.

Since an experience has a defined beginning and end, you also aren’t necessarily looking for the normal rhythms of work and rest. You might be thinking that you need to pack in as much as you can because you know your time is limited. And when you’re looking at your time overseas as an experience, when times get hard, you just dig in your heels and endure it. (Buy an air conditioner? Pish! I’m here to be tough.) The end is always in sight, and you are counting the days till it’s over.

When it comes time to decide if you should stay longer, it’s not even a consideration. The experience is over; so why should you stay? Your sights are already set on home; they have been for a long time. Staying longer seems unfathomable.

But when you enter your time overseas with the mindset that This is my life, then there is no end in sight. You realize that adaptation is key. Of course, this does not mean that you try to recreate your life back home. But it does mean that you are actively looking for that “new normal.” When times get tough, you aren’t counting the days until it’s over. Instead, you’re thinking about how you can make this work. How you can adapt. How you can either change your circumstances or change your perspective so that you aren’t utterly miserable all of the time.

What does this tangibly look like? Put pictures up on your walls. Plant a garden. Spend the extra money to get the couch you love, instead of someone’s old ugly hand-me-down. These are little things, but can help significantly with your mindset. Slow down. Watch TV sometimes. Don’t fret over “wasted” time learning language and culture, chomping at the bit to get your “real” ministry started. Watch. Wait. Listen. Learn. When the power goes out or you get three flat tires in a week, pay attention to your thinking. Are you telling yourself, “Just a few more months and this will be over,” or rather “How can I learn to live this way?”

You want to want to stay? Let me tell you something I’ve learned about contentment in this overseas life: The more you think about leaving, the more you will want to leave. The more you resolve yourself to stay, the more content you will be.

And one more thing: There will always be a reason to leave if you are looking for it. Always. If you want a reason, you will find it. So here’s my challenge: Instead of just asking yourself, Do I want to leave?, consider asking yourself, Is there a good reason why I shouldn’t stay longer?

Full disclosure: My family is in that place right now, asking ourselves that question. I realize that finding the answer is not simple, because it can be easy to mingle God’s calling with our own desires. Knowing when has been “long enough” can often become more complicated the longer you stay….because the experience has become life! That’s what’s kept us here fifteen years, and the depth of our friendships, the wealth of what we have learned, and the multiplying impact of ministry have made all of these years more than worth it. I pray it will be for you too.

This article was originally posted at A Life Overseas.

What Have I Done to My Children?

By Amy Medina

On March 1, 2019

In Leaving Tanzania, Liberia, Third Culture Kids

My family’s front porch in Liberia faced the ocean. A dirt road and a lagoon separated our house from where the sand began and the waves crashed, but it was enough of a beach house that the fridge rusted and my mom had to mop the salt off the floors every day.

Many hours would find me on the hammock on that front porch, one of the few places where my introverted tween awkwardness felt at home. It was a rough rope hammock, and I would sit sideways on it like a swing, my legs pushing against the cement railing on the porch. Liberian sunsets on that ocean, complete with silhouetted coconut palms, were as post-cardish as any honeymooner could ask for, but my clearest memories are of the rain.

Liberian rain was never some mamsy-pamsy sprinkling; it was a waterfall from the sky. The smell of that rain would engulf me, full of sea salt and warmth and growing things. And I would swing on my hammock, dreaming my young-girl dreams, and watch the lightning crack out of a dark sky and strike the expanse of my ocean.

We often miss the beauty of our childhoods while we are in the midst of it, much too focused on interpreting those best-friend-comments and science-project-scores to pay much attention, but the rain and the lightning and the swinging hammock was such a large, enveloping beauty that even in my twelve-year-old self-centeredness, I was able to feel something like awe.

Across that dirt road, in a house that was even closer to the ocean, lived friends. Their kids were around the same ages as my brother and I, and we spent many an afternoon canoeing on the swamp or trying to make a clubhouse in their attic, but it was so hot we could only each spend a few minutes in there at a time before we climbed down, gasping for breath. I practiced piano in their house every day, since they had a piano and we didn’t, and one at a time, we borrowed all of their Asterix and Tin Tin comics. “Bock, Bock!” I would holler at their screen door, because that’s what you said in Liberia when you came to someone’s door. They would always let me in.

We made a teepee out of palm branches and their daughter and me created fantasy lands for our Barbie dolls in the sand and the swamp and the forest around our homes. They were from Arizona, so at Christmas they introduced us to the tradition of paper bag lanterns–luminarias–which filled the humid night air with magic.

My third-culture-kid childhood was filled with so much beauty–both in the land itself, and in so many people who loved me and became like family, because that’s what happens when you find yourself thrust into a land with other foreigners who, like you, have no idea what they are doing.

I always wanted my own children to have a childhood like that.

Remarkably, they have. They already have more stamps in their passports than most people get in a lifetime. They’ve stood in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro and visited the Apartheid Museum in South Africa. They’ve fed giraffes in Kenya and watched baby sea turtles hatch and spent hundreds of hours in warm tropical oceans. And they have been deeply loved by Zimbabweans and Brits and Americans and Tanzanians who have enriched their lives with accents and cultures and family-bonds.

But as I dreamed that life for my kids, I failed to remember the grief.

It is easy to remember all the great stuff but naively think I would be able to protect my kids from all the hard stuff. Changing schools and relationships and countries and cultures several times in the course of a childhood–as extraordinary as it all sounds–is also excruciating.

Grace came home with a large drawing board in a plastic artist’s folder last week.

“It’s from my art teacher,” she said proudly. “He’s starting me on advanced art. He says that he’s going to give me a head’s start for IGCSE Art in 9th grade. I mean, if I’m here in 9th grade.”

If I’m here. Because we don’t know.

We had lunch with friends the other day, the ones who have felt like family for ten years. But they are leaving Tanzania this summer, and their daughter and Grace are an unbeatable duo–truly a sight to behold–on their basketball team. “You’ve got to come move near us and go to my school, and we can play basketball together!” she pleaded with Grace. Because it’s unthinkable to imagine living apart.

That same day we got more news: Another family we know and love will be leaving even sooner. I told the kids in the car; I didn’t want to look them in the eyes. Everyone was silent.

They are getting used to this.

And I wonder, What have I done to my children?

I remember how I wept when I found out that we wouldn’t be able to return to Liberia; wept for the loss of my home, wept for the country that was being destroyed by war. That family who lived on the other side of the road–after two years of water balloon fights and piano practices and luminarias and sharing every part of life–we separated into different worlds and we never saw them again.

I look into my children’s stony faces, steeling themselves against another loss; I hear the if I’m here in their voices and I remember my own childhood–the part I don’t like to remember. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” I’ll say without a moment’s hesitation. But is it fair to impose on them the pain that goes with it? Do I have the right to say to them, “This is going to hurt a whole lot, but it will be worth it?”

I guess that’s the thing about parenting–we make all these choices for these small people under our care, and they don’t get any say in it. We choose where they will live, how they will be educated, how many siblings they will have, who they will be friends with. None of this seems like a big deal when they are little and an extension of us, but then they get bigger and smarter and they start to realize that some of the choices we made for them have difficult repercussions. Our enthusiastic, It will be worth it! starts to sound more hollow, to them and to us, because the truth is, we really don’t know if it will be.

I’m realizing that as much as I want (and try) to write my kids’ stories for them, I really only get to make the basic outline. I can create the setting and even write in a bunch of the characters, but they control the perspective, which is really what makes or breaks a story. And ultimately, I must trust that there’s an Author who’s a whole lot bigger than I am, and who loves them a whole lot more than I do, who is doing most of the writing behind the scenes.

Tag: Thoughts on Missions Page 4 of 13

The Happiest Kind of Sadness: Portrait of a Friendship

What to Know Before You Go

When You’re Sharing Jesus as an Outsider

When You Want to Want to Stay Longer

What Have I Done to My Children?