Author: Krista Horn

Krista has roots in the Midwest but moved to Kenya in 2016 with her doctor husband and three boys ages 3 and under. After exchanging life in the far north for life on the equator, they have lived and served at a mission hospital ever since. While her husband stays busy teaching and training on the wards, Krista stays busy with all the details of motherhood on the mission field. When she’s not homeschooling, cooking from scratch, or helping her boys look for chameleons, she loves to curl up with a book and eat chocolate from her secret stash. She is known for packing chocolate chips before anything else goes into the suitcase. Krista blogs at Stories in Mission.

In Pursuit of Meaningful Memories During Home Assignment

As our family prepares to “cross the pond” for our next Home Ministry Assignment (HMA), we are experiencing all the familiar stress of transition: packing the house, packing the bags, saying goodbyes here, anticipating hellos there, and managing all the expectations on both sides of the world.

It’s a lot for a heart to hold, and a lot for the brain to process!

Amidst the necessary components of every HMA (such as speaking engagements, fundraising, attending meetings, etc.), we are also committed to prioritizing the pursuit of what is fun and memorable as a family, especially things that will help our children enjoy their passport culture as well as acclimate to a home country that is still somewhat foreign to them.

Our goal is to create meaningful memories during HMA: memories that are meaningful because they carry moments we treasure and/or because they help us navigate life in our passport culture.

During past HMAs, when our kids were younger, we pursued this goal in a variety of ways and discovered some amazing resources along the way which we plan to take advantage of again. This time around, as our kids are getting older, we’re also considering other priorities in addition to the familiar opportunities we’ve enjoyed in the past.

Here are five types of memory-making activities we’ll be pursuing—perhaps they’ll be helpful to you also as you plan your next home assignment.

1. Museums and Zoos

In the past we’ve made an effort to visit museums—art museums, science museums, natural history museums—for the sake of enjoying ourselves and learning at places we have little access to in our country of service. We learned that some museums are free while others have free days here and there, which requires some scheduling on our part but which makes it easier on the pocketbook for taking advantage of such offers.

During past HMAs we’ve also discovered that many museums and zoos are part of consortiums that offer free entrance or discounts at other institutions if you have a membership at one. It’s always worth asking what they offer. One year we bought a membership at a local children’s museum and discovered we had free access to several other institutions across the country because of it, which made for extra fun as we took advantage of the free access while traveling in between visits to churches and supporters. We fully intend to see what options are available to us this time around, too.

2. Public Libraries

Another vital resource has been the public library. Not only do we make regular visits to the library for the masses of free books at our disposal, but we also take note of what else they make available. Most libraries organize and offer free events on location, but they also occasionally partner with other institutions to offer even more. For example, we have sometimes gotten free tickets to museums (not only on the aforementioned free days) because the library loaned tickets to local museums, similar to checking out a book. Every location will have different offerings, but it’s good to ask what’s available!

3. Nature Centers and National Parks

Nature centers are another perennial favorite for our family. As we are home basing in a different location for this HMA, we are prioritizing the exploration of new nature centers and reserves that can provide the outdoor escape we all need.

Perhaps my favorite discovery which has created impressionable family memories when we’re in America is the National Park System’s 4th grader pass. Every Kid Outdoors offers families with a 4th grader (or homeschool equivalent) free access to national parks. As the National Park Service website says, “Every Kid Outdoors allows U.S. fourth graders and family members free access to over 2,000 federal lands and waters so you can discover our wildlife, resources, and history.” It’s so simple. Our family has already taken advantage of this opportunity twice during previous HMAs and has saved money while enjoying national parks as we traveled in between ministry responsibilities.

4. Sports Games and Concerts

This HMA we plan to take our kids to a football game—an American football game, not soccer, which is the sport they know and understand best growing up in Africa. As Americans, however, we come from a culture that highly values football and we feel like our kids would not only enjoy but also benefit from knowing more about the sport. At the very least we want them to understand the basics of the game and be able to participate in watching football with family and friends in a meaningful way. And so, in addition to gathering around the television to watch some games during NFL season, this HMA we’ll take them to a football game or two.

We’re also planning to take our kids to their first concert, which will not only be a fun experience for them but will also foster an ability for them to connect with peers about such things. Our kids have phased out of the children’s museum stage of life and are fully into a season of sports, music, and movies. We’re aiming to create experiences that will help them track with peers in our passport culture so that, someday, they’ll be better equipped to live and socialize in our passport culture if God leads them there.

Some of these examples are specific to our American context, but I recommend researching what resources are available to you in whatever your passport country is.

5. Establishing Regular Rhythms

It’s worth considering what’s worth investing in for the sake of taking care of your children (and yourselves) during a home assignment. Regular rhythms are of equal, if not greater, importance to establishing lasting memories. Things as simple as taking my son out for hot chocolate at a favorite coffee shop can go a long way in deepening our family ties in the midst of everything else demanding our time and attention. Investing time in catching up on particular movies and music will allow all of us to have socially intelligent conversations with people on that side of the world.

We will face the expectations and responsibilities of HMA no matter what, but we can choose how to spend our time in between ministry engagements and hopefully create meaningful memories along the way.

Instead of viewing it as a project—because maintaining a foothold in our passport country admittedly requires some work—we are focusing on the fun that awaits and the increased family time during a season when our kids have fewer friends on this side of the world.

There is time to walk around a nature center. There is space to visit an art museum. There is room to watch a football game and experience the hype of being in a cheering crowd.

There are meaningful memories within grasp. Our priority is to seize them.

Photo by Jessica Rockowitz on Unsplash

When Callings Collide

As I woke up on Mother’s Day to breakfast in bed, hand-written notes from each of my children, and freshly picked flowers, I was deeply thankful not only for the blessing of my three sons but also for the much-needed reminder that I’m not a complete failure as a mother.

Two days prior I was weeping on my bed over a difficult parenting situation and reeling from feelings of failure that I couldn’t pull myself together to keep going with the day, to keep parenting, to even put supper on the table. I couldn’t keep fighting the fight.

And not only did I feel like a failure as a mom, but also as a wife and a missionary and a writer. In our current busy season, I couldn’t remember the last time my husband and I had connected, I still hadn’t visited the person I’ve been planning to visit who needs emotional support, I still hadn’t filled out the report my organization asked for last month, and I still hadn’t drafted an article for this blog.

None of the roles I play were performed. None of the hats were donned. None of the plates were spinning.

It was a classic case of callings colliding and the subsequent doubting of whether it’s possible to faithfully carry them all at once.

Most people have more than one calling at the same time, and most people have doubted those callings at one time or another. Some callings are lifelong, some are seasonal. Some are thrust upon us, some are chosen by us. Some are obvious, some are difficult to discern. Some are ours alone, some need to be shared and navigated alongside others. Some are vocations, some avocations.

And many of them exist in tandem. I don’t set aside my calling as a mother in order to pick up my calling as a missionary. They coexist today and will coexist again tomorrow. The same goes for everything I’m called to. I’m called to marriage, to motherhood, to missions, and to writing (among other things), and it’s the regular collision of these callings that is so difficult to balance.

It’s nearly impossible to succeed let alone excel in multiple callings at once. Many days I completely fail at one or another, and sometimes I fail miserably. I can easily identify all the things I haven’t accomplished in my various roles—all the writing goals I haven’t achieved, all the texts and emails I haven’t sent, all the times I haven’t played a game with my kids despite them asking several times, all the date nights I haven’t taken with my husband because it’s one more thing to plan for and it feels like too much.

It can be hard to pick all the plates off the floor, let alone get them spinning.

But that’s true for most of us. I am certainly not the only mother out there struggling to find time and energy to pour into my marriage at the end of a long day on the homefront. I’m not the only missionary in the world needing to process my cross-cultural life through writing and finding next to no time to do it. I’m not the only spouse on the mission field scrambling to justify the label “missionary” when I spend all day at home teaching the kids while my husband spends all day helping and serving the poor.

When callings collide, it can be rather difficult to keep track of all those callings, let alone live them out all at once.

Which is why it’s so complicated, and also why we need God’s grace every day to live out the callings He’s given us.

So what does it mean to be a wife and a mother and a missionary and a writer? What does that look like day in and day out?

I honestly don’t know. Because even when I focus solely on one calling at a time, I don’t do it well every day. I get annoyed with my husband, I snap at my kids, I shut myself in the house to avoid any cross-cultural encounters, I ignore my writing project because eating chocolate and watching Netflix is just plain easier. I fail, and fail, and fail again.

BUT. But God’s grace remains just as constant as our failures do, and His grace speaks truth into the lie that we probably weren’t actually called to this and God must’ve made a mistake.

God’s grace declares, “You were made for this even though you aren’t perfect at it.”

His grace speaks, “You should acknowledge your failure but you must also acknowledge My presence and My strength to hold you up.”

His grace breathes, “I created you and I chose you for this. I still choose you for this. I did not make a mistake.”

His grace sends the child who left you in tears one day to whisper in your ear the next day, “You’re the best. There’s no one like you. That’s the truth.”

When callings collide, so does God’s grace and love and mercy. He is gentle with us when we fail. He is comforting when we grieve. He is kind in his encouragement, tender in his care, patient in his guidance. And perhaps more than anything, He is bold in his continued claim of us.

God never called me to be a perfect wife, a perfect mother, a perfect missionary, or a perfect writer. He called me to be all of these things and to make of them whatever I could, with His help. But when He called me to them, He knew I would occasionally fail at every one of them. Despite that, He still claims me as His own. And He still invites me to fulfill these callings.

I think God is pleased that I accept the callings He’s given me, and also that I wrestle through the difficulty of when those callings collide rather than throw them away because it seems too hard or downright impossible to figure it out any other way.

So I keep taking them up, these callings of mine, and wrestle with balancing them most days. And I pray that God will always send this reminder when I need it most: when callings collide, so does God’s grace and love and mercy.

Photo by Theodor Moise on Pixabay

Contending With Broken Culture


“Shame on God for not giving me a husband.”

This statement was the first domino to fall in a series of situations that created my current state of disillusionment.

I’ve certainly been disillusioned before, so I can recognize it for what it is, but my current plight is bordering on crisis. A slow building of shock and disbelief and frustration over time has resulted in many days when I feel ready to quit. We live in a predominantly Christian area where we partner in the work of discipleship, yet many circumstances have revealed an immature faith that have left me discouraged at best, defeated at worst.

The above comment about shaming God was spoken by a woman who’s prayed for decades for a husband and hasn’t found one yet. The comment provides keen insight into both the general culture and the religious culture here. Marriage is placed on such a high pedestal that it often becomes, quite simply, an idol. Marriage increases a person’s value and honor. To be married is to be better than anyone who is unmarried. (The same goes for having children.) The state or health of the marriage is often of less importance than the fact that someone can claim to be married.

Despite the temptation to dissect the glaring theological holes in the assertion that checking the “married” box is better than checking the “single” box, let me focus on something else. There is more at stake here. Blaming God is one thing, but shaming Him from within an honor/shame culture takes it even further. The act of shaming someone is meant to put him in his place. It’s meant to exclude him from the community and thereby disrupt, if not dissolve, relationships.

Shaming God, therefore, is an attempt to displace Him from a life of faith that doesn’t serve us the way we want it to.

Clearly, there are serious concerns with this. Hence the beginning of my current season of disillusionment. One situation after another left me looking around, wondering how on earth people could believe that certain falsehoods were true. What seemed clear to me was seemingly not clear to many others.

At first I thought it was mostly about individual belief systems and individual choices. And it was, to an extent. David was correct in saying, “Everyone has turned away, all have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one” (Psalm 53:3).

But I was quickly reminded that people the world over are impacted not only by our sin nature, but also by culture.

Because here’s the truth: culture itself is broken. Not just people within a certain time and place, but cultures in all times and all places. Worldviews, ideologies, philosophies — all broken.

This is not to say they are completely broken. On the contrary, there are incredibly beautiful aspects to every culture. But there is no perfect culture in all the world. There is no worldview that flawlessly aligns with God’s ways.

It might be said, “Every culture has turned away; all have become corrupt; there is not one which does good, not even one.” All worldviews, ideologies, and philosophies are products of human minds, thoughts, and beliefs, after all. If we are broken, so, too, are our cultures.

It is true of the culture I currently live in, as well as the culture I hail from. When I look at my home country right now, I find the same feeling I did when the woman shamed God: disillusionment. So much is so broken.

What are we to do? Like humanity, cultures will not be redeemed until Christ returns to set all things right. And like the sin nature we are all born with, we are also born with certain cultural predilections and predispositions. We are all products of culture. We all have blinders because we all are subject to ideologies that were deeply ingrained in us since birth. Whether from something as large as the culture of a nation or as small as the culture of a nuclear family, we are shaped by culture.

Some of what is deeply ingrained in us is fairly innocuous and simply won’t be changed. For example, I cannot imagine that I will ever think fried termites sound tasty. I can eat them, but I probably won’t ever choose to eat them, let alone crave them. The culture I grew up in taught me that eating bugs is gross. On the flip side, the culture I currently live in rejoices when the rains summon the flying termites out of the ground, which makes it easier to catch them and fry them.

Other, more serious matters were also deeply ingrained in me from my home culture, such as the equality of women and freedom of religion. These are values that I want to keep because they align with God’s values.

Some cultural norms taught to us can and should be changed because they do not line up with the heart of God. Everything we believe and practice needs to be examined alongside God’s Word, and anything that doesn’t align with Scripture needs to be adjusted. We aim to live by a kingdom cultural standard above any other — that is, by the values taught and exemplified by Jesus Christ. If our home culture or host culture has taught us anything in keeping with Scripture, we should hold onto it. If our home culture or host culture has taught us anything contradicting Scripture, we should combat it.

In short, it is our responsibility as Christ followers to examine the cultures we find ourselves in and cling to or discard whatever is necessary in order to live according to a kingdom culture.

This is not easy, especially when it goes against the grain. Kingdom culture often clashes with earthly cultures. For example, to a culture that sometimes idolizes marriage and even shames God for not granting a spouse, the Bible says that singleness should be accepted by some, and also there will be no marriage in heaven (Matthew 19:10-12; 22:29-30). Deeply ingrained cultural values can be extremely difficult to set aside in favor of biblical values.

But of course, it’s also not easy to pursue kingdom culture when our sinful human hearts want to do otherwise. Between broken people and broken cultures, the task ahead of us can seem insurmountable.

But there is hope — first of all because Christ offers and grants us strength to do what seems impossible. There is also hope because the Body of Christ exists to point each other back to God again and again. We can help each other keep our eyes fixed upon Jesus and also help each other pursue His ways as we fumble our way through this life.

Which is why, in the middle of this season of disillusionment, I was encouraged by a Kenyan brother in Christ who also sees the need to combat unbiblical values being embraced around us. He expressed, “We need to have a higher standard. We need to set a better example.” He said this as someone who deeply loves the Lord and as someone who desires to live according to a kingdom culture.

I admire his perspective and salute his commitment to modeling the ways of Jesus specifically when it counters accepted cultural norms.

That is how we defeat disillusionment before it defeats us. We keep Christ the center of all. We repent of our own unbiblical biases and values, and we turn to God’s Word for clarification and direction.

And we hold tightly to the belief that God’s ways — God’s kingdom culture — will be the only culture in the end.

photo by Pexels on Pixabay

Responsibly Bridging the Gap Between Needs and Resources

Perhaps it was naivete, or maybe it was the years-long process of settling into life overseas, but it took a long time before we fully realized that one of our vital roles as missionaries is to be an advocate for resources.

We spent our early years just putting one foot in front of the other, doing the tasks assigned to us each day without thinking much beyond that. But once the haze settled, and once we lifted our heads a bit to look and see what others were doing with the long-term in mind, we realized that we could — and should — be doing something to connect nationals with resources they struggled to access otherwise.

Resources across the globe are distributed disproportionately. By definition, this isn’t fair. Some people, communities, and nations simply have access to different resources than others. Because my husband and I come from a passport country that’s disproportionately well-resourced, we began to consider what our responsibilities were in terms of sharing those resources with those around us in our less-resourced context.

The most obvious resource we could think of was of a financial nature. We live in a part of the world that struggles with poverty. I can never again underestimate how life-changing having access to money is because I can never forget the day our house helper asked for help to buy food. Her son had cried through the night because of hunger, and she’d had nothing to give him. He was the same age as our three-year-old son.

The words of James rang loud in our ears: “Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?” (James 3:15-16).

Our house helper needed food, but she didn’t have the money to obtain any due to difficult circumstances. And I was hit square in the face with this reality: Money matters, and only those who have enough of it have the privilege of not thinking about it.

Over time, through a myriad of events, we began thinking about how to raise extra funds in order to help with ministry needs besides providing for our own living expenses.

On the one hand, it was difficult to think of raising more money than we had already raised for ourselves to live overseas. Any fundraising missionary will tell you what a huge task it is to raise enough funds to entirely support oneself, let alone a whole family, to live and serve in a place that cannot pay a missionary to be there. Then add to that task and raise even more funds? We were not particularly thrilled at the idea.

But we had seen it done by other global workers in thoughtful and effective ways, and eventually we started identifying ministry areas that would make sense for us to specifically raise funds for.

The reality is, we have access to funds because we have access to people with funds, unlike most of our African friends and colleagues. As Americans, our connections with people from the West automatically put us in a category of having more financial resources than almost anywhere else in the world.

We’ve also discovered that people with such resources are often able and willing to give. When we’ve reached out to our support base with a financial request for a particular need, we have routinely been surprised and blessed at how generous they can be.

Through their generosity, we’ve helped with a variety of projects over the years: renovating housing, funding tuition for our family medicine residents, upgrading infrastructure and sourcing medical equipment for the mission hospital, and purchasing Bibles for friends and neighbors. None of that would have been possible without our personal connections to people in our passport country with financial resources.

Yet we’ve also learned over the years that our ability to access resources goes beyond our personal network, proving even more the unique position we’re in to connect outside resources with the people right in front of us. I can’t count how many times the Lord has brought us financial resources through unexpected means. We can testify that the “six degrees of separation” theory is real as we’ve been given money from people who knew someone that knew someone else who heard through the grapevine that we were missionaries and decided to support us.

We’ve received financial support from people who follow a different religion than us, from people we’ve never met who sent a donation in memoriam of the deceased, from people who legitimately couldn’t remember my name, and even from a prison inmate. We’ve also been blessed with financial donations we never asked or looked for. God’s creativity in how He chooses to provide never ceases to amaze.

The point is this: We come from a place with resources. Our African ministry partners would not have access to those resources unless we were here to make the connection for them. Our role as missionaries in our context is not only to provide medical care and medical education, but to bridge the gap between tangible needs and helpful provisions.

Our access to resources is not only financial, however. We also have access to educational resources. We know where to acquire Bibles and books. We know how to get an account with a resource library like RightNowMedia. We know how to find and fill out an application for an educational institution. In a world that’s increasingly shrinking in terms of worldwide connections, we can be a resource to help our African friends and colleagues find and navigate opportunities that will help them.

Furthermore, we ourselves are a resource because of our own education and knowledge base. My husband and I both went to university. I went on to get a master’s degree, and he went on to get a doctorate degree. This knowledge is its own resource, and we have the privilege of sharing it with others.

Understanding this transformed our approach to ministry. It broadened our scope beyond our originally narrow focus. It helped us think about and embrace a more holistic methodology about what we do. It has positively impacted our relationships and has given us greater perspective when we consider things like, “Do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased” (Hebrews 13:16).

Sharing what we have, material or otherwise, is indeed a good thing.

To be clear, I am in no way suggesting that we provide arbitrary handouts for the under-resourced. I live in a country where handouts have been given too often for too long, and I have seen the detrimental effects of such an approach to helping the poor. Rather, I’m in favor of providing specific and useful resources that are given to trusted people we know who will utilize said resources in a productive way, or who will learn how to do so as we walk alongside them and show them how to make use of those resources.

Neither am I suggesting that sharing resources is a one-way street. On the contrary, I think it’s only right and fair that we share what we have since our local partners are constantly sharing with us.

If they didn’t share their social knowledge with us, we’d have no idea how to begin navigating cross-cultural communication. If they didn’t share their produce with us, I still wouldn’t know how to properly cut a mango or mix thorn fruit with other fruits to help dilute the taste. If they didn’t teach us how to appropriately discuss death in the hospital (which is vastly different than how we do it in our own culture), we’d be offending and alienating people right and left.

Perhaps my favorite example of this is the first patient my husband ever cared for in Kenya. My husband, a highly trained and competent doctor, found himself face-to-face with a young man with malaria, tuberculosis meningitis, and HIV. He had never encountered any of these conditions during his years of training in America and was completely at a loss.

If it hadn’t been for an intern, whose training paled in comparison to my husband’s but who knew these conditions well, my husband would never have made it through that first day. He had so much to learn, and he was able to because of people here who shared their knowledge with him. Although my husband is now quite proficient in all manner of tropical diseases and water-borne illnesses after nearly a decade of working at a mission hospital in Africa, he never could have acquired that knowledge on his own.

Our journey of understanding more about sharing our resources is directly tied to our particular ministry context, but I encourage you to ask similar questions that helped us realize our responsibility along the way:

What resources do I have access to?

How can those resources be useful in my context?

Which people is God inviting me to share resources with, and how can our relationships be blessed because of them?

It’s been said that God has deep pockets. May we readily participate in emptying them.

 

Photo from Unsplash by Alex Radelich

Our One and Only True Calling

I will never forget that August day, the day we learned we were being rerouted to a different mission site than we’d originally been appointed. We were at the tail end of my husband’s family medicine residency, finally finishing seven years of medical training that had consumed our lives. The end of residency signaled the opening of a door to finally tie up loose ends and head overseas as medical missionaries, a calling that had led and guided us for the past decade.

My husband was at the hospital when the news came, so I was home alone with our two small sons. I couldn’t call and interrupt his workday, so I absorbed the sudden shift in our plans alone. I lay on the bed, curled into a ball, and wept.

On the one hand, my highly emotional response might seem odd given the fact that we had never been to either the previously appointed mission site nor the newly appointed one. Our attachment to either place was minimal at best.

Yet on the other hand, our decision-making process had been filled with prayer and reflection, along with conversations providing counsel. We felt as confident as anyone can when making a decision of this kind. We were grateful not only for a place to go, but for the clarity and confirmation regarding the where and the when.

Until that day when the news came that we would no longer be going to the place we were sure we were meant to go.

When my husband came home, I unleashed a new wave of tears. Together, we asked the typical questions. Did we miss something? Did we misunderstand what God was asking us to do? Did we close our eyes and ears to what He was saying so we’d only hear what we wanted to hear? What did this mean, logistically and spiritually? Should we agree with the new direction our organization had set for us, or go back to the beginning and start again?

Although the questions continued swirling for a long time, our way forward was surprisingly and blessedly clear from the moment our path took a sharp turn. We chose to submit to authority, trusting that the knowledge of people who’d been in missions for years and decades ahead of us knew better than we did. That assumption proved true in the end, although it took a long time for us to understand all the dynamics at play that led to our unexpected change of course.

One question that didn’t initially occur to me at the time of being rerouted was one I thought I already knew: What is your calling?

Before the upheaval in my heart that August day, I would have said that my calling was to serve in medical missions alongside my doctor husband. More specifically, we were called to serve in Africa. More specifically still, we were called to serve with a residency training program in Kenya that educates and equips family medicine physicians from Africa for Africa. The final detail in our calling was the specific location in which we’d seek to carry out the aforementioned particulars.

We had it all sorted out. Our calling was specific and clear.

Being rerouted to a new location didn’t change anything else about our calling. We would still serve in medical missions, with the same residency training program in the same country as we expected to. The only change was the literal location within Kenya where we’d live and serve. In hindsight, I realize that’s a relatively minor adjustment compared to some changes other missionaries have had to endure. It was enough of a diversion from our expectations, however, to cause real emotional turmoil and require a long process of healing and coming to terms with our new reality.

Also, it was enough of an alteration to make me question our calling.

If the location of our ministry will be on the other side of the country than we thought, what is our calling? If we’ll be working with a different people group than we’d planned, what is our calling? If our ministry asks us to do something we don’t feel equipped to do, what is our calling?

In an unpredictable, ever-changing world, I had to land on the one thing that never changes: our one and only true calling is to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength (Deut. 6:5, Mark 12:29-30).

On a practical level, the way we express our love for the Lord will differ from one person to the next. We are made with certain gifts and talents which are meant to love and glorify and serve the Lord in various capacities, and which are meant to fulfill specific callings He’s made known to us.

But when our circumstances prohibit our gifts and talents from being expressed easily, or at all, we are left with either despairing of fulfilling our callings or clinging to the foundation of our faith. That foundation is this: He who first loved us is ultimately inviting us to love Him back, to cherish who He is and what He’s done, and to respond with an outpouring of love (1 John 4:10, 19).

I’m reminded of David, who spent approximately fifteen years waiting for his calling to become the next king of Israel to come to fruition. After becoming the king of Judah following the death of Saul, David had to wait an additional seven years before becoming the king of all Israel (2 Sam. 5:4-5).

This was a man whose calling was as clear as it comes: the prophet of God anointed him as God’s chosen. And although David knew from the outset that he’d have to wait a while to become king (Saul was still sitting on the throne, after all), he probably didn’t imagine it would take as long as it did, nor that he’d spend a decent amount of that waiting period on the run, fleeing for his life through the wilderness.

For as obvious as his calling was, the details of how to fulfill it were as clear as mud. I can well imagine the questions plaguing David as he hid in caves and worked to stay one step ahead of Saul’s murderous mission: Why is this happening? Did I miss something? Is this even worth pursuing anymore? Did God choose the wrong man?

We get a glimpse into his inner thoughts through the many psalms he penned, not only over the course of a lifetime but even some that were written during the exact season he was escaping Saul. Given the intensely stressful situation he found himself in, it’s perhaps unsurprising that some lines of these psalms (Psalms 34, 54, 56, 59) are of an imprecatory nature.[1]

Other lines, however, offer insight into another layer of David’s emotions. After his close friend Jonathan urged him to flee from Saul, David found himself in the land of the Philistines, unsafe and pretending to be insane in order to preserve his life (1 Sam. 21:10-15). In tandem with that episode, David penned the words, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Ps. 34:18).

The chosen and anointed future king of Israel was residing in a foreign and hostile land, behaving like a madman with drool running down his face in front of an enemy king. His calling had seemingly gone haywire. His expectations of assuming the throne were as far from his current reality as they could possibly be.

And while openly admitting how the circumstances had broken his heart, David also declared that the Lord was near and ready to save his crushed spirit. How can someone so far off from his calling say such a thing?

Because he knew the answer to the foundational question we must all ask ourselves: What is your calling?

David’s answer: to love the Lord. Regardless of the direction (or misdirection) his calling had taken at the time, David never forsook the truth that he was loved by God and was invited to love God back.

This is not to say that we can’t or shouldn’t grieve when our callings change course or even hit a dead end. Of the same event among the Philistines in Gath, David also wrote, “Record my lament; list my tears on your scroll – are they not in your record?” (Ps. 56:8). Yes, we can and should cry, weep, and wail. God hears it all and receives it all.

But alongside our confusion, questions, and laments is the truth that David recorded for us while hiding in the wilderness of Ziph and having the locals expose his whereabouts to Saul (1 Sam. 23:7-29): “Surely God is my help; the Lord is the one who sustains me.” (Ps. 54:4).

How can someone whose calling has been derailed by enemies and other opponents proclaim that God sustains him? Because he knew that his calling was more than a situation or a time or a place. David’s calling was a position with God, a right relationship with his Creator.

My comparatively minor bump in the road that August day was vastly different than David’s years of aiming at a moving target, but it brought me to the same place it brought David. It made me go back to the core of my faith and remind myself that no matter where I am, what I’m doing, or when I’m doing it, my purpose is to love the Lord.

Yes, there are specifics to our individual callings, and we should not overlook them because they matter – we are gifted in specific ways for specific God-honoring tasks and I believe not only that they matter in this lifetime but will also matter in the next. We will, after all, be held accountable for what we have done here and now.

I certainly hope that the Lord was pleased with how I used my gifts to serve the kingdom when we landed at the new mission site, just as I hope He is still pleased with me for how I’m using my gifts at the original site we eventually got to. I hope that my response to our missionary calling, however convoluted it seemed at times, has honored the Lord.

But before we focus on the ways we’ve obeyed God’s commands, before we remember the ways we’ve responded to God’s invitations to follow certain callings, I hope we will rejoice in one another’s response to our one and only true calling.

When I get to heaven, my hope and desire is to answer the question, “What did you do in your earthly life?” with a resounding and emphatic, “I loved the Lord.”

 

[1] Imprecations invoke curses on one’s enemies, which was common among ancient near Eastern literature, although it should be noted that David’s imprecations place the responsibility of redresses in the hands of the Lord, the divine Judge. Imprecations may also appeal to God to act against evil.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preeze on Unsplash

 

Why We Need “Ineffective” Missionaries


We were newly appointed missionaries who hadn’t left for the field yet, and our paths crossed with some other workers who spoke about a previous overseas experience. They had been ministering alongside a veteran missionary who’d been there for decades. “But he wasn’t very effective,” they said. “He’d been there for nearly thirty years and didn’t have a single convert! He clearly didn’t know what he was doing.”

In the moment, I didn’t know how to respond. On the one hand, I was shocked and outraged that these people would judge someone for an apparent lack of obvious fruit in his ministry. On the other hand, I was suddenly and worriedly faced with the question, “Will someone say that of us someday?”

I suppose it’s entirely possible that this poor fellow, whoever he was, was an altogether ineffective missionary. There are plenty of people who are ill-suited to the task of living and ministering cross-culturally, and perhaps this guy was one of them.

But the context of the conversation made it clear there was a direct connection being made between his many years of service and his overall lack of success. No converts = bad missionary.

This conclusion demands a question of us all: How do we measure success as missionaries?

That’s a broad question, so let me ask another, narrower question: Is one missionary’s success more worthy of celebration than another?

Even narrower still: Are there tiers in ministry work? Is the work of an evangelist more important than the work of an educator? Is a Bible translator given special honor over and above someone doing Farming God’s Way?

It’s important to ask these questions because they help inform and shape our understanding of the Great Commission, as well as our understanding of how we view each other’s ministry work.

As someone who is primarily in the ministry of discipleship, the number of times I’ve led someone to belief in Jesus is low. The number of times I’ve helped someone grow deeper in their knowledge of and love for Jesus is extremely high, however. That line of work is how God has gifted me and called me. Would I pass the “conversion statistics” test? Probably not. But am I glorifying God by doing what He’s invited me to do? I sure hope so.

While I readily admit that it’s possible the veteran missionary in the story was actually ineffective, I imagine it’s more likely that he was wrongly accused of being so. If that’s the case, it’s worth exploring why such people are deemed ineffective, and why we really need people like that in missions.

It all comes back to being members of the Body of Christ. As Paul said, “Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others” (Romans 12:4-5).

Put another way: “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow” (1 Corinthians 3:6).

This means that someone in one area of ministry might be more likely to actually lead people to conversion, while others are more likely to lead up to that point or disciple people after that point.

Being able to record a large number on your missions report card for the number of conversions you’ve overseen is all well and good (truly, so good!) but it should never detract from all the other work done in an effort to bear fruit for God’s kingdom.

Later, after I had time to consider the critical assessment of the veteran missionary’s years of service, I hoped that he really did lead some people to Christ, whether anyone else knew it or not (including himself). It reminded me of two people who, years after the fact, told my husband that he was instrumental in helping them come to Christ.

As it turns out, he had planted a seed, or maybe watered it, and then God made it grow. My husband didn’t know they’d become followers of Jesus, and he still wouldn’t know to this day if it weren’t for these people choosing to reach out and tell him so. Maybe that’s the story of the veteran missionary too.

But even if it’s not, even if the missionary truly didn’t lead anyone to Christ in all those years on the mission field, does that mean he had no idea what he was doing? Does that mean his ministry was ineffective, useless, or dishonoring to God somehow?

Is an “ineffective” ministry completely fruitless?

Even if no one made a confession of faith as a direct result of this man’s ministry, we cannot and should not discount the soil he tilled, the seeds he planted, or the plants he watered (not to mention the fruit born within himself, as we hopefully can all attest to as ministers of the Gospel).

If we minimize this important work, we minimize the entire fruit-bearing process.

If we mistakenly assume that some parts of the process are more essential than others, the entire process is undermined. If we erroneously think that some aspects of mission work are more worthy than others, we’ve established an unholy tier system that has no place in the kingdom of God.

I’m reminded of the specialty “tiers” in the medical world, which became obvious to us leading up to my husband’s Match Day – the single most important day for any medical student, in which every fourth-year student is matched to a residency program for the next several years of their life. Match Day determines not only where you will go for your next season of training, but what specialty you will train in (internal medicine, pediatrics, neurosurgery, radiology, etc.).

For months before Match Day, there were ongoing discussions among my husband and his classmates about what specialties everyone hoped for. Everyone can choose their own specialty but must match to a residency program in order to actually train in that specialty.

Within the medical culture, specialties are unofficially placed in a tier system based on a variety of factors, namely the number of years you need to spend doing further training, the number of hours you’ll typically have to work once you’re a board-certified specialist, and your future expected salary.

My husband, who chose to pursue family medicine, was admonished more than once by fellow healthcare workers for choosing a specialty that “doesn’t pay much.” Family medicine is a low-tier specialty. You train for the least amount of time (only a three-year residency, which doesn’t scream prestige) and receive relatively low pay as far as doctors go.

Conversely, anyone hoping to become a pediatric heart surgeon will typically undergo a five-year general surgery residency followed by another three years in fellowship training. It makes my husband’s three-year family medicine residency pale in comparison. Such an extremely-specialized doctor will also undoubtedly receive a very nice paycheck.

Despite the stereotypes, the question must be asked: are some doctors more important by virtue of being more specialized?

Is my husband’s medical care less necessary because he’s never taken out an appendix or cured cataracts?

I would answer emphatically: no.

We need all medical specialties to cover the vast medical needs of the human body. When you don’t have access to all the specialties (as we certainly don’t at our rural mission hospital), you become acutely aware of how diverse and complex the human body is and how broad the gaps in medical care really are when certain specialties are MIA.

Again: “Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”

We need missionaries whose ministries convert people in droves, and we need people who faithfully till the soil even if they don’t see a single baptism after a lifetime on the field. Both are needed and both should be valued as doing essential kingdom work. Just like an internal medicine doctor consults with a general surgeon about a patient needing surgery, then the surgeon puts the patient back into the hands of a family medicine doctor for post-op care, each part of the Body relies on each other to get the job done.

If we recognize and value all those who labor for the Gospel, then we can see the big picture of what God is doing. God is a God who works over time, a God who writes stories that most of us will only ever see a sliver of.

Believing that God is on the move even when there is little if any obvious fruit in our ministries is why we can remember someone like David Livingstone, often considered one of the greatest missionaries of his day, as a paragon when he only had one convert who eventually backslid.

Grouping missionary work into tiers and/or assuming that success is gauged primarily by outward achievements exposes a lack of patience with God’s process and a narrow perspective of His kingdom.

Missionaries in all manner of ministries around the world are bringing Jesus to the world. Praise God! We need the ways of Jesus practiced and proclaimed around the world, through word and deed, and we should encourage and help each other along as we co-labor toward that end.

I’ve ministered cross-culturally for nine years and I’m not sure anyone has chosen to believe in Jesus as a direct result of my ministry. By all accounts, I’m a fairly “ineffective” missionary if the standard being used is how flashy or report-card-worthy my ministry is. But I like to think I’m in good company, both with others who’ve gone before me and with those who are faithfully ministering in this day and age.

Regardless of how many people I lead to Christ through my ministry, I hope others will be able to look at my years of service on the mission field and declare, “She obeyed and she went, and she was fruitful.”

Photo by Yurii Khomitskyi on Unsplash

Do Extroverts Make the Best Missionaries?


I once sat in a conference room full of Christians when the speaker asked the group if we thought Jesus was an introvert or an extrovert. The question was offered offhandedly – it wasn’t meant to invite much discussion, let alone heated theological debate – yet it garnered an instantaneous and nearly unanimous conclusion: Jesus was an introvert. The reasoning was based on a handful of Scripture passages that mention Jesus going off by himself to be in solitude and to pray.

I’d never considered the question before. I’d certainly spent plenty of time and agony trying to identify my own tendencies. I’m one of those people who’s difficult to define in the introvert/extrovert debate. Years ago the DiSC personality test revealed that I’m a “flexor,” and a recent SDI assessment confirmed that earlier result, showing me to be a HUB.

But I’d never spent much time wondering what kind of personality Jesus had. His character? Sure, I’d thought about that in spades. But whether he made his bed in the morning or left his blanket a rumpled mess? Whether he liked to join an impromptu song around the campfire or sit and listen in silence? Whether he felt at ease or sick to his stomach while dealing with interpersonal conflict? These questions hadn’t ever occurred to me.

After further reflection, I think it could be argued that Jesus was a disciplined extrovert – someone who thrived on being with people but who knew the importance of being with the Father and prioritized time alone with him.

In truth, I could believe either assumption. Introvert, extrovert, or somewhere in between.

What I really wonder is how being an introvert or extrovert (or somewhere in between) impacts our daily lives as missionaries?

Consider Paul. He had all the trademarks of a rather social messenger of the Gospel, not only because of the countless people he interacted with on his extensive travel itinerary as a missionary, but also because of the exhaustive lists of people he mentioned and thanked in closing some of his letters. Paul worked with a lot of people and, furthermore, maintained relationships with a lot of people. These are seemingly extroverted qualities.

I’m reminded of an extroverted missionary colleague of mine. She never tired of welcoming people at her door who unexpectedly stopped by for a visit, she never balked at going to another meeting, and she never said no to whatever hangout or last-minute activity was happening. If she didn’t socialize, it was typically because she was already committed to another social engagement. She was well known and well-loved in our community. In a highly social culture, she had an easy time adjusting to the social milieu of this place, and she was able to make connections faster and deeper than some of her introverted counterparts.

And I found myself wondering, “Is she more effective than me, by virtue of being more present?”

But I also had to wonder how she would have fared in a different culture, one where people are wary of strangers and everyone tends to keep to themselves?

God might call an extrovert to a social culture, which is a gift and a blessing because they can bounce from one social engagement to the next and not lose steam. God might call an introvert to a reclusive culture, which is a gift and blessing because they can be at peace with people avoiding them on the street.

But God might call an extrovert to a lonely place, which is a challenge and a struggle because they can’t find an outlet for their social needs. Or God might call an introvert to a communal place, which is a challenge and a struggle because they can’t get enough time for themselves to recharge before reentering the fray.

God gifts each of us in certain ways and invites us to minister out of our strengths, but he also equips each of us despite our limitations and invites us to minister out of our weaknesses.

Obviously, there are strengths and weaknesses to being an introvert or extrovert (or something in between), and the strengths of each serve the Gospel in different ways. And, yes, I think some cultures are a more seamless fit for either introverted or extroverted tendencies, but that doesn’t mean one is better than another.

Sometimes, like Paul, we have to stretch ourselves to be all things to all people. Extroverts need to introvert. Introverts need to extrovert. We become all things to all people, including practicing the parts of our personality that we usually define as the weaker parts.

Similarly, we must also be wary of overdoing our strengths. I know of a missionary who extroverted so much that he neglected his responsibilities, including failing to report to his mission organization and connecting with supporters. And I know of missionaries who introverted so much that they did nothing outside of their required ministry obligations and therefore had limited relational depth or impact.

Do extroverts make the best missionaries? Not necessarily. Extroversion might be a particular asset in a particular place and time, but it cannot be assumed that extroversion outweighs introversion in a cross-cultural mission context.

A similar question might be asked: do singles make the best missionaries? After all, they don’t have the added responsibilities of meeting the needs of a spouse or children. Paul said as much in 1 Corinthians 7. He also exemplified a life with complete freedom to come and go and socialize and pour into relationships all day and all night if he wanted to. He was not nearly as limited as a married person.

Sometimes I’ve wondered how much less effective I am by the simple virtue of being married with kids. Don’t get me wrong, I am fiercely defensive of the notion that my ministry of discipling my children at home is of utmost importance and is building the Kingdom just as much as anything else. But mostly I’m impressed at how much single missionaries are able to accomplish compared to me.

Jesus himself was single, as was Paul. And as far as we know, all the disciples were unmarried except for Peter. Although being married doesn’t disqualify anyone from having an impactful and fruitful ministry – think of the notable example of Peter, as well as Aquila and Priscilla – being married has its drawbacks, namely a necessary division of labor between familial obligations and ministry outside the home.

Do singles make the best missionaries?

Do single extroverts make the best missionaries?

My colleague was not only extroverted, but single. She was a powerhouse of time and energy. What she was able to accomplish in a day was far and above my own capacity. But although she excelled in being with people and having time for any number of projects, she had limitations in other areas.

Strengths and weaknesses, weaknesses and strengths.

I found myself supremely thankful for my single, extroverted colleague, who sat on a committee I had no bandwidth for. Likewise, she expressed her awe and gratitude that I led our community Bible Study, which requires hours by myself to study and prepare for in addition to the social time at the actual Bible Study. Regularly, this colleague with extra social capital to spend would hang out with my kids and play games which freed me to do any number of other things that needed doing.

In short, we both had valuable strengths to offer, and we held each other up in our weaknesses.

So, who makes the best missionary? Or to phrase it another way: who makes an effective missionary?

Extroverts, introverts, marrieds, and singles.

Regardless of our God-given personality or marital status, the Kingdom is best served when we employ our strengths and allow others to do the same.

So let’s offer our strengths and support each other in our weaknesses, and in so doing, build up the Kingdom in whatever corner of the world the Lord has invited us to serve.


Photo by Pexels on Pixabay

The Harvest is Plentiful and the Workers Won’t Stay

Within three months of landing on the mission field, my husband found himself overseeing six departments at the hospital. Several factors led to such a sudden and taxing situation, but the underlying cause was the absence of nearly all other physician personnel at the time. Some had recently left for Home Assignment, others hadn’t yet returned from Home Assignment, and still others had left to make their final transition back to their passport country.

The all-consuming work and responsibilities my husband had to shoulder during that season hearkened back to a bygone era when pioneer missionaries were often entirely alone to bear all the work singlehandedly, enduring by pure grit and God’s grace.

It was the first of many times we’ve found ourselves remembering the words of Jesus: “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few” (Matthew 9:37).

There is nothing new under the sun. There weren’t enough workers when the disciples and Paul were traipsing around the Ancient Near East and beyond, preaching the Good News to whoever would listen. There weren’t enough workers when Hudson Taylor prayed and pled for more missionaries to serve in China. There aren’t enough workers now when the world has never been more connected and yet untold numbers still haven’t heard the name of Jesus.

The realities are not new – the workers remain few – but the reasons for that reality have arguably changed.

Although the lack of workers for the harvest has been a persistent problem since the time of Christ, nowadays there is a new and noticeable trend in missions: those who go don’t necessarily stay.

The definition of what it means “to stay” will differ from one person to the next. I won’t attempt to argue that point since I don’t have a concrete answer myself. What I’m pondering is the noticeable shift in less missionaries staying for an entire career or even a lifetime, compared to our predecessors throughout history.

Many missionaries famously gave the greater portion of their lives to living and serving cross-culturally. People like St. Patrick and Adoniram Judson spent decades in their place of service, ultimately living out their days there. Lesser-known servants like George Liele and Lilias Trotter also have incredible track records of spending more than half their lives overseas. Even in my own country of service, Kenya, a pioneer missionary named Johannes Rebmann served here for 29 years before eventually returning to his home country of Germany because he was so ill and blind that he was finally persuaded to leave.

There are still people who commit an entire career, or lifetime, to the mission field – we know several from our own organization – but the number of people staying for 20, 30, or 40 years is growing smaller by the decade.

Is that a problem? I’m not sure. The state of missions is much different than it was even a hundred years ago. No one boards a ship to spend weeks or months just traveling to a mission field, let alone knowing it will be an untold time before they might see family or home again. We hop on a plane and arrive at our destination in a time that can be measured in hours, meaning we can hop on another plane and return to our passport country in the same relatively convenient manner without much thought.

That is perhaps one of the most obvious reasons why not as many people stay long-term anymore: international travel has made it so much easier to come and go around the world that short-term and mid-term options have become plentiful and accessible for many. People can go without needing to commit to a career or lifetime of service. As missionaries who are regularly helped by short-term and mid-term volunteers, I can testify to how impactful that length of service is, meaning that although increased options for length of service have impacted how long people tend to stay, it also means that more people are choosing to go in the first place. Fewer are staying longer, but more are going than ever before.

What else has impacted how long missionaries stay on the field? Countless reasons exist, not least of which include required visas to remain in country (a concern of the modern era which neither Paul nor Patrick had to worry about), and prioritizing the health and welfare of our families (many great missionary heroes of the faith were faithless to care for the concerns of their families, who suffered greatly as a result of their missionary zeal).

All of these factors are part of the ever-changing face of missions. For various reasons, we’re seeing a trend that missionaries aren’t staying as long as they used to. Some of the reasons are troubling; some are good; all are interesting to consider.

Jesus was clear that the workers are few. That was true in His time, and it remains true in our time. We have personally felt that reality, but we also know that someday we’ll be the ones to leave (assuming we don’t stay here till we die), leaving others after us to feel that reality too.

What to do? First of all, we need to heed the words of Jesus: “Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest fields” (Matthew 9:38). The first response is prayer.

Additionally, we need to consider how to increase the longevity of those who are already in the harvest fields. If some can stay longer, the number of workers will naturally increase over time.

Regardless of whether a missionary unit decides to stay for long or short, what matters most is whether their choice to leave could have been a choice to stay if certain measures had been put in place to increase their longevity. Sometimes there is nothing to be done. A denied visa signals a clear exit from the country. A medical crisis compels us to get the help we need, often off the mission field. Sometimes our length of service is completely out of our hands.

My question is how to increase longevity when we do have some semblance of control? There is no clear-cut answer, but I wonder what measures could be put in place to help us in this modern era of missions?

One response is the current rise in both the awareness of Member Care needs as well as an increase in personnel in Member Care departments across mission organizations. Member Care services seek to improve and/or maintain the well-being of missionaries, whether it be physical, emotional, mental, relational, or spiritual. Member Care departments that can help missionaries remain healthy can also enable them to stay longer.

Another response comes from an organization that has noticed the trend away from long-term missions and is making an attempt to reverse that. The Longevity Project, a ministry of MedSend, exists to help medical missionaries stay on the mission field longer. Medical missionaries are notorious for experiencing frequent episodes of burnout, often due to moral injury and little time for self-care, ultimately leading to high rates of attrition. To combat this, MedSend created a “multi-faceted initiative to provide professional, relational, and spiritual support to healthcare missionaries. The Longevity Project not only supports the welfare of the missionary family but also works to ensure they can continue in their service on the mission field.” Some of the services they currently offer include financial assistance to access counseling, retreats specifically designed for medical missionaries, and support for raising and educating TCKs.

The Longevity Project is one attempt to overcome the barriers that keep people from staying longer on the mission field. How else can we, as a broader missions community, as sending churches and organizations, and as people committed to sharing the Good News around the world, find ways to increase missionary longevity?

We need to ask this question because our hearts are aligned with Jesus, who, right before He spoke that famous harvest quote, saw the crowds of people in need of hearing the Truth and had compassion on them because they were “like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36).

We care that the Gospel goes forth. We care that the name of Jesus is proclaimed. We care that the whole world has a chance to hear of the Savior. And this should lead us to care about how to help missionaries continue participating in the Great Commission for as long as possible.

Photo from Pixabay

When Roots Don’t Stay Rooted

Somewhere along the way in this globally mobile life, I subconsciously and mistakenly adhered to the idea that other people – the non-globally mobile folks – don’t move. Our life is so chaotic in its never-ending transitions that I, apparently, fell into a false belief that no one else does what we do, not even a little bit.

Who else goes back and forth regularly between passport country and country of service, packing up belongings with practiced precision? To be on the move is part and parcel of the expat life. As we’ve spent the past several months in America for our home assignment, I’ve felt validated in the uniqueness of our globally mobile life because several people have told me as much. “You move around so much. We can’t imagine doing that.”

While it’s true that most people don’t move around so much, it’s also true that people do move. Which is what I apparently forgot, or didn’t want to believe, because it was better for my emotional well-being to lean on the assumed stability of those who stay put.

People who stay put offer an anchor to those of us who move around. When the anchor is pulled up, we don’t always know where to land anymore. 

So when my parents told us they’d decided to move from my hometown – the only place I’d grown up and the only place our family had landed during home assignments in the States – I suddenly realized how much I’d depended on their stability to extend itself onto us. Their rootedness had offered roots to us too, an anchor that I never imagined being pulled up.

I recently reread the story of Cain and Abel and found myself gobsmacked by Cain’s curse. While the first part is bad enough – the ground will no longer yield crops for him – it was the second part that haunted me: “You will be a restless wanderer on the earth” (Genesis 4:12b).

The curse of Cain was to wander the earth, to be rootless, to have no particular place to call home. What a curse! To not know where you belong, to be unable to put down roots and thus consign your children to the same rootlessness as you with no sense of home. It’s no wonder Cain responded with, “My punishment is more than I can bear.”

The Lord’s punishment was just, as are all His judgements, yet I can’t help but feel empathy for the world’s first murderer. I never could have understood such a consequence before becoming a wanderer myself, albeit by God’s calling rather than His consequences. But what a shock to realize that God’s calling on my life was another person’s punishment.

Being unable to answer the question, “Where is home?” is a unique struggle that few people face. As expats, we sometimes even wear the struggle like a badge of honor, often reminding ourselves of the profound and comforting quote from Tolkien: “Not all those who wander are lost.”

Although Tolkien clearly meant that the journey can be its own end where we find meaning and purpose, and although I believe that to be true, it’s also true that some of those who wander are indeed lost. Some are wanderers, by definition, because they don’t know which way will lead them home.

That is how I feel. I am a wanderer, lost, unable to answer the question, “Where is home?” My answer to this question has become nearly as confusing and convoluted as my children’s answer, which attempts to explain that their parents are from different states and where they were born is different than where they live when they’re in America which is different from where they now live in Kenya which is different than where they used to live in Kenya.

Part of the problem is that American culture doesn’t clearly define “home.” In the culture where we live in Kenya, “home” is where the family hails from. No matter where you may travel or end up living, your home is at the shamba, the “home place” where your family has lived for generations. Granted, it’s relatively easy to define since most of the family doesn’t move anywhere – subsistence farmers tend to stay put. 

Still, it’s deeply entrenched in a person from the day they’re born that home is the land where the family is from, and anyone who does leave (for a job or school or whatever else) can come home anytime and be welcomed and feel at home. Furthermore, it’s expected that everyone will be buried at home, at the shamba. No matter where you are when you die, you should be buried at home to rest there forever.

I’ve acquired enough of an appreciation for this aspect of Kenyan culture to wish that my own American culture was more like it. It’s fairly easy for a Kenyan to answer the question, “Where is home?” I wish it were that easy for me.

The one place on earth that I feel most at home is my parents’ house, the one they are moving away from. If I were Kenyan, I could be buried there, preferably by the pond where the pine trees grow.

As I was processing and grieving the upcoming change that means I’ll never set foot in my childhood home again, I confessed to our kids that my parents’ house is where I feel most at home in the world. Our son instantly questioned me. “You don’t think [where we live in Africa] is home?” Well, yes, I do. But also, no. It certainly defines “home” for all five of us together, but would I want to be buried there? Probably not.

Even before the current rootlessness I feel, I’ve spent years helping our third culture kids think about home this way: “Whenever we’re together, we’re home.” Or another iteration: “Wherever we’re together, we’re home.” Home is not a place, but the people we are with.

As I cling to my people through this transition, I’m reminded that no matter how rooted or rootless we feel on this earth, not one of us is truly at home here. As C.S. Lewis so succinctly said, “We were made for another world.”

Psalm 90:1 says it best: “Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations.” Even those who have a shamba to return to where the family has lived for generations will never fully be at home. Our home is not a place, but a Person. The Lord alone is an anchor that will never be pulled up. His promises to me – to love me forever and never leave or forsake me – are the only roots I need.

In the same stanza with that famous Tolkien line about wanderers is another line: “Deep roots are not reached by the frost.” Deep roots – the deepest of roots – will not be reached by whatever in this world attempts to freeze them. Deep roots in Christ are not reached by the transitions of others. They are not reached by an inability to answer the question, “Where is home?” They are not reached by any fear or grief or loss of place.

Deep roots remain rooted. What a comfort that is to this sometimes restless wanderer.

Photo from Pixabay

 

Why Public Speaking Skills Make a Difference for the Gospel

She pulled my husband aside and said, “We want him to let more missionaries speak during the service, so don’t screw this up!” The woman didn’t bother whispering despite the referenced person being well within earshot. As a former medical missionary and long-time supporter of ours, she was unashamed and undeterred in her mission to put missionaries in the pulpit when they visited the church during furlough. 

We were scheduled to speak during the Sunday morning service and had been given the full sermon time to share about our ministry in Kenya – a rarity under the current pastor. Despite the church’s long history of faithfully supporting missions and enthusiastically listening to missionaries speak when they came through, this particular pastor wasn’t keen on giving missionaries the spotlight.

His rationale? After decades of pastoring, he’d heard far too many terrible missionary presentations, which vastly outnumbered the compelling ones.

The church – as missions-minded as they come – had been trying to convince him that missionaries should get the pulpit and the full sermon time, as they used to when previous pastors had been in charge, but he routinely pushed back, saying they could have a Q&A afterward and take all the time they needed when the service was done.

The pastor wasn’t opposed to missionaries sharing about their ministries around the world. He was opposed to giving them a microphone and too much time on the stage.

The woman’s comment to my husband was a charge to prove that missionaries can speak in churches and not make everyone in the congregation regret giving them the pulpit.

Despite my own zeal for the opposite measure – giving missionaries the chance to speak when the most people are apt to hear them, i.e. during the Sunday morning service – I can’t say I blame anyone for viewing such an occasion as high-risk.

Public speaking isn’t exactly the kind of job skill listed on most missionaries’ resumes. We tend to do well with people in less-formal settings, doing things like Bible studies, community health development projects, discipleship, and children’s ministries. We equip ourselves with skills like translating, evangelism, mentorship, organizational leadership, and, in the case of my husband, medical work.

All of this means that most missionaries aren’t gifted in public speaking. Most of the population doesn’t have the gift either, and many people in Western cultures even fear it. Glossophobia, the fear of public speaking, is very real. Even missionaries who do have a God-given skill in the art of rhetoric probably didn’t become a missionary because they thought, “I’m good at public speaking! I guess I should become a missionary!”

In reality, the vast majority of missionaries felt called to missions first and only later resigned themselves to the public speaking part of the job. And it is a part of the job, not only because supporting churches have a right (and hopefully a genuine interest) in hearing about the ministry they’re financially and prayerfully supporting, but because it’s biblical.

The apostle Paul left on his first missionary journey after the church in Syrian Antioch commissioned him and Barnabas and sent them off. After traveling around Asia Minor, preaching the Gospel and ministering to the churches, Paul and Barnabas “sailed back to Antioch, where they had been committed to the grace of God for the work they had now completed. On arriving there, they gathered the church together and reported all that God had done through them and how he had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles” (Acts 14:26-27, NIV).

I have no doubt that Paul and Barnabas shared a myriad of stories. They talked about intense struggles they faced along the way (including a stoning so severe that Paul was left for dead), but I imagine they focused mostly on sharing stories of people who heard the Good News of Jesus.

Paul and Barnabas knew the importance of testifying to what God was doing around the world. They knew it was vital to report back to those who had sent them, not only for accountability and responsibility’s sake, but for the encouragement of God’s people. They all – we all – need reminders that God is on the move, all around the world, all the time.

The question then becomes: When we as missionaries have the opportunity to return to our sending churches and report “all that God had done,” how do we speak without botching it? Paul and Barnabas were in the minority – they were gifted speakers and were even in the preacher category. Speaking was not a resigned part of the job for them. It was the job.

In fact, in Iconium they “spoke so effectively that a great number of Jews and Greeks believed” (Acts 14:1b). Returning to Antioch and speaking to the believers about what had happened was just one more time they spoke in front of a group of people.

But what about the majority of missionaries, the non-preachers, the I-would-gladly-do-anything-but-speak folks? How do missionaries speak without making pastors and congregants cringe as they sit in the pews? It’s a question we need to take seriously because, of all the responsibilities in our care, testifying to what God is doing around the world is of utmost importance.

We’ve probably all heard stories of bad missionary presentations – when a missionary was boring or long-winded at best – and hoped we wouldn’t be the next person to further cement the impression that missionaries are terrible public speakers.

The only way to combat this is to actually improve in this area, to train ourselves to be presenters and speakers whether we’re only given a few minutes on stage to introduce ourselves or are actually allowed to speak at length. We want our opportunities to talk about what God is doing around the world to be memorable – for all the right reasons.

I have often joked that the tagline of missions should be: “If you’re here, you’re the right person for the job.” Missionaries spend countless time and energy learning skills they never imagined needing, yet we do it for the sake of ministry. We learn to fundraise, learn languages, write grants, oversee renovation projects, plan events, homeschool, and so on. Public speaking is no different. It’s a part of the job, and it’s something we should train ourselves to do no matter how uncomfortable it makes us feel.

Whatever it takes – reading books, watching YouTube videos and TED Talks, practicing in front of a mirror or a trusted friend – we should care about improving our public speaking skills. The goal is not to become the next Paul and Barnabas. The goal is to be welcomed to share “all that God had done” when visiting a sending church because we can be trusted to testify well to the work of God around the world.

Before that Sunday morning when my husband and I were graciously given the full sermon time to speak, we prepared by discussing not only what we wanted to say, but how we wanted to say it. We discussed transitions, tones of voice, pacing of speech, and movements on stage. We were eager to share stories of how God is moving in Kenya, but also hopeful that the presentation of those stories would have an impact.

Later, the pastor who was so reluctant to give us the pulpit expressed that in nearly 50 years of ministry he’d never heard a more effective missionary presentation.

Thank God we didn’t screw it up.

More to the point, thank God that He is truly at work all around the world, including in the hearts and minds of missionaries who find themselves in a position of speaking publicly about Him.

Photo by Irina L on Pixabay

The God Who Comes Near to Save

In our predominantly Christian corner of East Africa, the prosperity gospel is often preached in churches and curses are often pronounced by witch doctors in villages. We have fewer encounters with other religions than with skewed interpretations and applications of our own religion.

As with anywhere in the world, there is still more room for the Gospel to go forth, to take root, and to grow deep. In our particular context, the message of Christ has gone forth and taken root in many hearts, but the soil is shallow and the roots are thin. As Jesus himself said, faith is easily uprooted in those conditions (Matthew 13:20-21).

With the intention of deepening and strengthening roots, we work to impart the truth of who God really is and how he interacts with us and our world. This deeply matters because who God is – and isn’t – shapes not only how we live our lives but how we relate to our Savior.

Last year I sat outside a Buddhist temple with my nine-year-old son and talked about what God requires of us. Our family had traveled to Thailand for a missions conference and had the privilege of visiting two temples during our time there. The first temple we visited was particularly memorable because of its design. We had never been to a place like that before and our fantasy-loving boys were instantly enamored with the dragons carved into the temple architecture.

Truth be told, I was enamored too. But it wasn’t just the dragons that intrigued me. The entire building was magnificent, clearly constructed with care and tended to with honor and respect. The red walls complimented the gold columns and statues and perfectly matched the red, white, and gold patterned tiles on the floor.

We admired the devotion of the Buddhists who had originally built the structure as well as the worshippers visiting the temple that day. We ourselves had walked through the temple, first taking off our shoes like everyone else, and marveled at the architectural masterpiece we found ourselves in. Incense filled our noses with unfamiliar scents and filled our minds with questions. The numerous Buddhas sprinkled throughout the temple drew our attention again and again.

The entire experience proved a powerful conversation tool for talking with our children about religion. We talked about why people were lighting incense, why they knelt before the Buddha, why they walked laps around the temple. The experience ignited their minds.

It was at the second temple we visited, with a golden Buddha as tall as the building itself, that our son asked me pointed questions about God and people as we sat outside putting our shoes back on. “Why are all these people doing this? God said we don’t have to do stuff like this to be saved.”

My son was right, but these people didn’t know that. When I told him such, he heaved a huge sigh. His heart was full of the truth of God and full of the grief that comes with knowing other people are unaware of that truth.

I told my son the worshippers walking in and out of the temple were doing what they thought was best, or even necessary, to please God. They wanted to please God, which is good. But our human nature thinks we need to do something to win God’s approval, to do something to earn salvation. “But we don’t need to,” my son said. And he was right – because he knows who God really is and who he isn’t.

Sometime later, back in Kenya, I read The Iliad with our boys as a part of our homeschool history unit on ancient civilizations. What stood out to us was how often the Greek gods meddled with the minds of men and women for their own selfish ends, or, perhaps worse, for their own entertainment.

It was shocking, really, to read about gods who came to earth to dwell among men but who did so to take advantage of them or to prove their own power and authority. Those gods deceived their worshippers, tearing them down in order to build themselves up.

After Ancient Greece we studied Ancient Rome, and then we had the privilege of visiting Rome during travels to Europe for a leadership conference where we walked the same ancient streets as emperors who attained godhood upon their deaths (and were sometimes worshipped as a god during their lifetime).

God didn’t have to come down; God was already here, an inherent deity running through the veins of a man in power over an empire. This “emperor god” had his own interests at heart – that of expanding the empire and ensuring his supreme authority by enforcing submissive “peace” throughout the empire, the same “peace” that destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70 and used the spoils of war to fund the building of the Colosseum back in Rome.

Our globally mobile lifestyle has helped us think about religions around the world, both ancient and contemporary. Learning about the gods of other religions helps us learn about our own God too – who He is and who He isn’t.

Our God is love, and our God is near. He is Love Come Down, not to have his own needs met but to meet our needs instead.

Our God makes no demands. He is graciously present – gracious because His very presence is an unmerited gift which expects nothing in return. He chooses to dwell with us not to exact punishment or mischief or deception, but to demonstrate His choice of us.

Our God is hope personified. We have eternal hope in Him because salvation comes to us, not because of us or our good deeds.

In the captivating book, God With Us: A Journey Home, Jeremy Pierre beautifully describes who our God is when he explains the two names of the Messiah: Jesus (The Lord Saves) and Immanuel (God With Us). “These two names are only good news when they go together. God With Us is dangerous news for sinners, unless he also comes as God is Salvation. Together, these names are the gospel.”

As we conclude this holiday season and enter the new year, we continue to celebrate this gospel story. We celebrate that God kept His promise to send a Savior. We celebrate that God came near. We celebrate that God came in love. We celebrate that His coming is our salvation. We celebrate that His salvation calls for repentance without penance.

We rejoice in these truths, and we proclaim them. This is the Good News, and we hope and pray it will not only go forth, but also take root and grow deep in our corner of the world.

I’m Not the Same Person Anymore

by Krista Horn

I’ve known for a long time that living overseas has changed me. Of course it has.  But the extent to which it has shaped me – how I think about the world, how I interpret Scripture, how I relate to others – is most obvious when I return to my passport country.

We returned to America six months ago for a Home Assignment, and I have routinely discovered ways in which living overseas has changed me. There are relatively small, insignificant changes like the fact that I now prefer to drink water from the tap instead of a filter simply because the ability to drink clean water straight from the tap feels like a magical experience. But there are also big, significant changes like how we choose to spend our money and how we interpret media.

My expression of my faith has also been impacted by living overseas. For example, while I appreciate the ease with which I can worship in America – the familiar songs, a recognizable worship style, blending into a crowd – I’ve found myself longing for the chance to work at worshipping again. It takes mental energy to sing in a foreign language and translate words in my head, and it requires extra physical stamina to stand for such a long time in a Kenyan worship service. I have to work at worshipping with my Kenyan brothers and sisters, and a unique blessing comes with that. Sometimes my worship experience in America feels incomplete without expending extra energy to participate in it.

My prayer life has been impacted too. As someone who lives outside my passport country, I’ve gained an increased awareness of the rest of the world, and I pray for people and places that weren’t on my radar before I moved overseas. I also know how encouraging it is to be someone living in a foreign country who is the recipient of prayers of people on the other side of the globe. Those prayers are meaningful and helpful, and I’ve chosen to be a person who also prays for others around the world.

I can pray for others around the world because I now think of others around the world much more often than I used to. I can’t have a conversation in America about Covid or church or the school system without also thinking of how these topics are affecting people in other places. When people discuss the healthcare system, I can’t help but think of the Kenyan healthcare system we work with, as well as those in surrounding countries where our medical residents hail from (and plan to return to when they graduate).

When someone mentions travel, I not only think about travel within the United States, but also about travel in Europe and the Middle East, which directly impacts what route we can take back to Africa. When climate change and the environment are brought up, I recall the plague of locusts in our region and the droughts that have persisted in our host country. I can’t help but think of people outside the American context. My life overseas has expanded my previous worldview and shrunk my sense of self, and I’m incredibly grateful for that.

I’ve also been humbled to realize that any amount of time spent overseas has the power to change a person, not just living overseas full-time. Recently I met someone who served overseas for six months and was forever changed by it. I am nearing six years of living overseas, and I have been forever changed by it. And I know people who spent six days overseas and were forever changed by it. I was reminded of this when a woman at church approached us and said she wanted to financially support our ministry because she had been on some short-term missions trips that changed her. She has been involved with missions ever since, including supporting long-term folks like us.

No matter how long you’ve spent overseas, it has the power to change you. It can make you rethink your preconceived notions. It can make you practice your faith in new ways. It can make you care about people and places you knew little about before. It can expand your worldview and shrink your sense of self.

And quite frankly, those sound like good changes to me.

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Krista Horn married the man who once took her on a date to go tree climbing, which just about sealed the deal then and there. After her husband slogged through seven years of medical school and residency (with Krista doing quite a bit of slogging herself between work, grad school, and becoming a mom), they left for the mission field with three boys 3 and under. They have lived and worked at a mission hospital in Kenya since 2016. While her husband is busy on the wards, Krista stays busy with all the details of motherhood on the mission field. When she’s not homeschooling or cooking from scratch or helping her boys search for chameleons, she loves to curl up with a book and eat chocolate from her secret stash. Krista blogs at www.storiesinmission.blogspot.com.