Author: Michele Phoenix

Born in France to a Canadian father and an American mother, Michèle is a consultant, writer, and speaker motivated by a deep passion for Third Culture Kids. After teaching for twenty years at Black Forest Academy (Germany), she launched her own ministry—equipping MKs and TCKs for flourishing, while offering those who care for them the information they need to love them well. Michèle travels globally to consult and teach, drawing from her thirty-plus years of experience in TCK spaces. Her latest book, Pieces of Purple, won Christianity Today's Book Award in 2025. It is a collection of all she's ever learned and written about the MK/TCK experience. Along with her articles, novels, and podcast, it can be accessed through her website: michelephoenix.com.

Neurodiversity in the World of TCKs

You might be wondering why addressing neurodivergence in the context of ministry is an important endeavor. I get it — I’ve wondered too! The best answer I can offer is this: because neurodivergent children and adults live among us. Because they are cherished by God and worthy of our investment of time and effort. And because ignorance is not bliss — it can fracture God’s Kingdom with misunderstandings, conflict, and the withholding of empathy.

If only because it grows us into loving better and more thoughtfully, I believe that learning more about the humans around us is a spiritual practice and God-given privilege.

NEURODIVERSITY IN THE WORLD OF TCKs

There is a particular kind of exhaustion many globally mobile families experience. The kind that feels linked—sometimes in obscure ways—to that third airport security line, that calendar-busting conference, that language-learning plateau, that brutal goodbye to friends we may not see again, that moment your child dissolves into tears because the cereal tastes different in this country, or that weather pattern that sucks the life out of everyday activities.

In the cross-cultural community, we tend to tell ourselves that it’s transition stress. Culture shock. Jet lag. Grief. And often, it is—or a combination of them all.

But there can also be something more complex happening beneath the surface. Something quieter, more deeply wired into the way a child experiences the world—or, in the case of MKs, multiple worlds.

What is neurodivergence?

In recent years, conversations around neurodiversity have become far more common. Current estimates suggest that between 15% and 20% of the population may be neurodivergent, so it’s no wonder that efforts to deepen our understanding are expanding.

At its simplest, neurodivergence means that a brain functions differently from what is considered usual or “typical.” Neurodiversity embraces the idea that everybody’s brain works uniquely and that neurodivergence is a normal variation.

ADHD, autism, OCD, dyslexia, sensory processing differences, dyscalculia, traumatic brain injury, and other neurological differences can all fall under this broad umbrella. Neurodivergence can show up in countless ways—from sensory overwhelm and learning differences to intense creativity, diminished executive function, or information processing that differs from that of brains considered more “typical.”

The Strengths of Neurodivergence

Though neurological differences were formerly viewed simply as deficits, researchers and clinicians now understand neurodivergence as part of the natural variation of human brains—producing unique strengths as well as unique challenges.

It’s important to remember that these same TCKs wrestling with layers of difference often possess extraordinary gifts.

In her article At the Intersection: Navigating Neurodivergence and Third Culture Kids, Dr. Kristen Williamson highlights the creativity, innovation, empathy, deep focus, and problem-solving abilities that frequently accompany neurodivergence. The child who notices details everyone else misses. The teenager who learns languages through patterns and rhythms. The young adult whose emotional sensitivity allows them to connect deeply across cultures.

Sometimes the very wiring that makes life more complicated also allows a child to experience beauty, excel academically, analyze complex data, and respond with empathy more naturally than the rest of us do.

The Relief of Diagnosis

Of the adult TCKs interviewed for this article and its accompanying video, most weren’t diagnosed until adulthood. Sometimes diagnosis came after burnout. After reentry. After struggles in higher education. Or after years of wondering why ordinary life seemed to require extraordinary effort.

For many neurodivergent people and their families, diagnosis itself is not the devastating moment they feared. Often, it brings relief—because there is finally language for their strengths and challenges. There is an explanation for why transitions feel catastrophic rather than merely difficult. Why noise feels physically painful. Why social interaction requires marathon-level energy. Why someone can appear perfectly composed in public and completely unravel at home.

Neurodivergence in Cross-Cultural Spaces

For Third Culture Kids, neurodivergence can create a particularly layered experience because so much of TCK life already requires constant adaptation. New schools. New languages. New social rules. New expectations. New relationships. New losses.

Indian writer and advocate Nanyadiri, who is autistic and has ADHD (AuDHD), describes the autistic TCK life as “a difference inside a difference.” The phrase captures something globally mobile families recognize in their children with neurodivergence: some are not merely learning to adapt across cultures; they are trying to navigate a world that may already have been unpredictable, confusing, or painfully loud—and now it is exponentially more overwhelming.

Transition is one of the greatest challenges for neurodivergent TCKs. Airports. Temporary housing. Shifting routines. New foods. Unfamiliar smells. Different classroom expectations. New cultural customs. All the unpredictability that globally mobile families eventually normalize can feel deeply dysregulating.

For some children, the adventure of it all feels exhilarating. But for others, it might feel more like being forced to stand in the chaos of Times Square at rush hour—with strangers yelling questions, street vendors selling unfamiliar things, friends pushing new foods at their faces, and a thunderous storm assailing them with rain and wind—all while realizing that everything familiar (people, places, routines, their own bed) is no longer within reach.

Now imagine trying to manage that 24/7—without protective filters, escape routes, or loved ones who understand how exhausting it is.

The Tangled Strands of TCKness and Neurodivergence

The challenges don’t end with transition. For those who love TCKs with autism, OCD, ADHD, and other forms of neurodivergence, distinguishing brain differences from cross-cultural traits can be difficult.

The impact of neurodivergence, trauma, and chronic stress can sometimes look remarkably similar. Frequent moves, unresolved grief, political instability, educational disruption, repeated upheaval, and abuse can all affect a child’s nervous system. Meanwhile, globally mobile life itself already looks unconventional.

A child who struggles socially may be assumed to be adjusting to a new culture. A child overwhelmed in crowds may be labeled sensitive. Executive-functioning difficulties may be blamed on transition stress rather than recognized as part of ADHD or autism.

Jenilee Goodwin, a fellow A Life Overseas writer, notes in How to Notice Neurodiversity in Third Culture Kids that neurodivergent TCKs often slip under the radar for precisely this reason. Sometimes what we’re seeing really is TCK struggle. Sometimes it is an expression of an underlying brain difference. Quite frequently, it is a combination of both.

This is why untangling the strands of TCKness and neurodivergence is so complicated. It takes time, learning, wisdom, and often an investment of effort and funds in professional evaluation. Understanding the “why” behind a child’s behavior is essential to providing support that addresses their actual needs rather than applying strategies that may exacerbate their struggles.

Knowing more can change the entire conversation from frustration to compassion—and then to appropriate action.

The Realities of Masking

Another reason neurodivergence gets missed in cross-cultural communities is that so many children become exceptionally good at masking. Especially TCKs. Especially bright, capable, adaptable children who are praised for maturity and flexibility.

Girls, in particular, are often missed because their struggles don’t match traditional stereotypes of neurodivergence. Rather than appearing disruptive or hyperactive, many become experts at people-pleasing, perfectionism, emotional caretaking, or quiet overachievement. They may look socially successful while privately rehearsing conversations, analyzing interactions, and becoming chronically exhausted from trying to make coping appear effortless.

In missionary and ministry environments, children who mask well may be celebrated as adaptable, mature, helpful, and selfless while carrying extraordinary levels of internal stress.

And boys can mask too—especially thoughtful, sensitive boys who learn early that emotional overwhelm or social confusion feels unsafe to reveal. But because many people still picture neurodivergence primarily as a loud little boy bouncing off classroom walls, quieter presentations are frequently overlooked altogether.

So many neurodivergent TCKs are working tirelessly behind the scenes to appear “fine.” They study social expectations. They rehearse conversations. They observe peers and imitate what seems socially acceptable. They hold themselves together all day and then collapse emotionally once they reach home.

Psychologist Laura Mannucci captures this beautifully in Belonging in Translation: Autism, ADHD, and the Hidden Labor of Adapting Across Cultures: “When you have learned to mirror others to belong, the authentic self becomes hard to locate.”

The immense mental effort required to constantly decode cultural expectations while also navigating neurodivergence becomes, as Mannucci describes it, “an ongoing negotiation between worlds.” For many TCKs, that hidden hypervigilance becomes a way of life—and an exhausting drain on their energy.

What Neurodivergent TCKs Need from All of Us

According to the TCKs I interviewed, one of the gentlest shifts parents can make is moving from disciplining difference to approaching it with curiosity. Instead of asking, “Why is my child overreacting?” ask, “What might this situation feel like inside my child’s nervous system? What could be the reason for that?” Instead of rewarding the masking that allows children to appear more “typical,” invest time, effort, and funding into the kind of research and testing that might uncover liberating answers.

And then extend love—because there are far too many neurodivergent TCKs who believe their brain difference is failure, weakness, or even sin. We as a community need to speak—and be—the antidote to those destructive lies.

So what can we actually do?

Throughout ministry life, small changes can foster stability and safety: limiting social commitments, building in respite, creating quiet spaces and predictable routines, reducing toxic stress where possible, educating siblings and community members, and supporting activities that allow for regulation and expression—art, movement, writing, creating, organizing, inventing, or analyzing.

Even adjusting family menus to accommodate intolerable textures and tastes can matter. For some autistic children, this isn’t simply a food preference; it is a visceral inability to get past the texture or taste.

Jenilee Goodwin encourages families in transition to build predictability wherever possible: visual schedules, familiar foods, comfort objects, advance warning before changes, recovery time after overstimulation, and small rituals carried from country to country.

These things may sound insignificant to people who function more typically, but to a neurodivergent child, they can feel like safety in the swirling center of threatening chaos.

Parents may also need to reevaluate expectations around pace and productivity. Many neurodivergent TCKs can technically endure crowded schedules, rapid travel, stimulating ministry environments, and constant social interaction—while paying an invisible emotional cost.

A child may be coping remarkably well on the outside while quietly unraveling internally.

But there’s a huge difference between surviving and flourishing.

The Beauty in the Difference

Goodwin’s articles emphasize the importance of helping children understand their own brains with dignity and compassion. Neurodivergent children need language that frames their differences not as personal failures, but as part of their unique wiring. Dr. Williamson argues that when neurodivergent TCKs receive understanding and support, many develop exceptional resilience, intercultural awareness, empathy, and creativity.

When I speak with adult TCKs who received a diagnosis about what they wish someone had told them sooner, they point to the crucial importance of parents and loved ones affirming who they are—and rejecting the lies the world and their own inner voice might inflict on them.

Perhaps one of the most hopeful truths emerging from these conversations is that many neurodivergent TCK adults—with affirmation, care, support, and therapy—eventually come to see their differences not merely as obstacles, but as part of the very wiring that shaped their strengths. The sensitivity that once led to overwhelm becomes empathy. Hyper-awareness becomes emotional intelligence. The lifelong practice of observing cultures and decoding people becomes insight and wisdom.

The traits that complicated childhood can become part of what allows these adults to move through the world with unusual compassion, creativity, and depth.

Not despite their wiring—because of it.

And perhaps that is the invitation here—not to pathologize difference, nor to romanticize struggle, but to notice children more carefully. To listen more curiously. To create environments where they do not have to spend their lives pretending to be less sensitive, less intense, less observant, or less themselves in order to belong.

Because some of the children who experience the world most deeply may also be the ones most capable of helping the rest of us see it more clearly.

They are not broken.

They are not burdens.

They are unique, precious, created by God, and so very loved by Him.

Further learning:

— This version of the article does not include the profound and fascinating quotes collected from eleven neurodivergent adult TCKs. You can find the full article here.

— My entire three-part series on TCKs and Neurodiversity (including an interview with Jenilee Goodwin, an extended version of this article, and a videoed collection of personal stories from adult TCKs) is here.

— Additional reading:

Belonging in Translation — Laura Mannucci
Different, Not Less — Chloé Hayden
Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World That Wasn’t Designed for You — Jenara Nerenberg
Driven to Distraction — Hallowell & Ratey
Embracing the Autism Spectrum — Dr. Stephanie Holmes
Lost in Translation: The Social Language Theory of Neurodivergence — Janae Elisabeth
Neurodiversity for Dummies — John Marble, Khushboo Chabria, and Ranga Jayaraman
Uniquely Human — Barry Prizant
Uniquely Us — Dr. Stephanie Holmes
Unmasking Autism — Devon Price

God Was Not in the Storm

I was leaving a conference room after a lengthy presentation when a woman I’d never met before — I’ll call her Judy — came up to me and said, “God chose you for this storm. He knew it would give you a richer story to tell.”

She was referring to something I’d alluded to only briefly in my seminar, as a means to emphasize God’s power to console — the recurrence of breast cancer I had to battle in 2018, which ended in life- and body-altering surgery.

Judy looked at me earnestly and kindly as she essentially stated that cancer was an affliction chosen by God, wrapped in divine motives, and addressed directly to me.

I looked Judy in the face and lowered my voice. “God didn’t cause this storm,” I said. “But He was in it with me.”

I quelled the impulse to add more to my response. It wouldn’t help — it never did. For the woman now looking at me uncomfortably, a trial on the scale of what I’d endured had to have been both intended and inflicted by God Himself so I could bear a more convincing witness to His goodness.

That’s the problem with verbal placebos of imprecise theological origins. It’s the problem with simple statements that roll off our tongues so easily in the ministry community, when we’re eager to say something, anything, and reach for platitudes.

In an attempt to lend meaning to the unimaginable, we too often condense complex biblical concepts into sentence-long statements that can do more to misrepresent God than to express the mercy, compassion and relational longing of his heart.

More dangerously, those statements can intentionally or unintentionally convey the message that God is not only in the storm, but the originator of the storm—that all pain, not just some pain, is God-inflicted.

God chose you for this disease to punish you.

God picked you to walk your child to her death so you would learn to trust him in the trauma.

God selected your marriage to be destroyed by infidelity because your trust in him would be an effective witness to others.

I work with TCKs. I’ve heard them wrestling with a casually articulated theology of suffering in which God is painted in unsympathetic and self-aggrandizing terms by adults with decades of faith, who don’t understand how their words are perceived by young, fragile souls whose faith is not yet strong enough to hold their weight.

Children hear the statements to which Bible-savvy adults might be able to apply context and nuance, but to their ears (and to the ears of anyone whose faith is still in its infancy), the words can stand stark and unmitigated.

“God chose you for this storm” means exactly that to them, especially when stated by people whose faith is more mature than theirs. God chose me for this loss, this injury, this misery. God wanted me to suffer. He chose me for this cancer, this abuse, this addiction, this isolation, this unbearable reality. God wanted me to hurt this way for divine reasons that make no sense to me.

By using uncareful language in an attempt to bring spiritual clarity to contexts that are, at best, unfathomable to the human mind, we too often make of God the instigator of all storms, portraying him, as Judy did, as a merciless tyrant who uses our pain to punish, teach, or hijack our suffering for his greater glory.

As someone who is acquainted with pain — having endured abuse, years of depression and life-threatening illness — I can assure you that I’d be hard pressed to trust a god who was always the perpetrator of my torment.

Yet the Bible is filled with instances in which death and destruction were not His handiwork. The children and young believers in our lives need to have these pointed out to them again and again by adults whose relationship with Jesus they trust. Though His justice and discipline are sometimes meted out in painful ways, our suffering more often originates elsewhere —

The self-inflicted turmoil of flawed human beings like Adam and Eve, David, and Judas.

The collateral damage from someone else’s sin endured by people like Tamar, Hosea, and Paul.

The physical decay of illness and old age.

The maleficent pain of the devil’s targeted attacks.

The cataclysmic havoc of a groaning planet on which tectonic plates shift and oceans surge.

It may be our desperation to make sense of our pain that moves us to proclaim a divine actuating of the loss and trauma that maim and confound us.

Perhaps it’s also easier to pin the unexplainable on God rather than leave a question mark where we’d rather find certainty. Yet naming God as our assailant can cause a sort of spiritual dysphoria in which He is both our comforter and the orchestrator of our distress.

The implications can be trust- and faith-shattering, especially when applied to the worst of life’s pain — the molestation of a child, the murder of innocents, widespread famine, and deadly tsunamis. Global pandemics too. If we don’t measure the meaning of our God-words, we may unintentionally communicate to young people with young faith that God willed all atrocities into existence so He can prove himself to be God.

Expecting those who are suffering to turn to that God for solace may be asking too much. Even if those suffering have been raised in the complicated, Jesus-centered world of ministry, where faith can be as much a “job” and an obligation as a relationship.

I didn’t remind Judy about Elijah’s story when she told me that God had essentially pointed at me and said, “Michèle Phoenix — she’s the one I want to see lying awake at night knowing that she might die a horrible death in the months ahead. She’s the one I want to see retching from the anxiety of vague medical answers. She’s the one I want to see waiting in the pre-op room to have her body altered in ways her mind still can’t comprehend. Michèle — she’s the one I pick for this battle, even though she’s already suffered so much.”

Yet it is the prophet Elijah I go back to every time the enormity of what I’ve been through threatens my image of God as a loving and comforting Father. Every time the evening news covers an atrocity I can scarce fathom. Every time someone I know endures a loss that threatens to destroy her.

Elijah feared for his life when he fled to a cave on Mount Horeb. Then a storm of monumental proportions enveloped the mountain on which he’d found refuge. It’s right there in 1 Kings 19:

We’re told that winds strong enough to break rocks in two raged around him. But God was not in the wind.

The earth rocked and spasmed under his feet. But God was not in the quake.

When a fire consumed the mountain, scorching it with its power and intensity, God was not in the fire.

The Bible clearly states: God was not in that storm.

Well-intended Christians might have seen nature’s bluster and declared to Elijah that God was the perpetrator of the wind, earthquake and fire — that He was punishing Him for fleeing or ordering him to praise him with the display of force and fury.

Yet when God speaks to the prophet, it isn’t in the raging storm. It’s from directly at his side, in a whisper only Elijah can hear.

He reveals himself intimately. Lovingly. Gently.

People who are young in age and young in faith need us to acquaint them with this God. Through our words about Him. Through our trust in Him. Through our dependence. Through our love. Through our embodiment of the healing and comforting traits of God.

They need the litany of platitudes that make God their lyncher to be replaced by a fierce proclamation of God’s heart for them. They need to know that, though God may redeem that inevitable pain of humanness by using it to empower his purposes, he grieves when his children suffer. He rages when they’re harmed. It breaks his Father-heart.

God is not in every storm. He does not routinely injure us to teach us to praise him. He does not indiscriminately slaughter us so our families learn to trust him. He does not callously afflict us with diseases and death so our waning lives can bring glory to his name. He does not rejoice in the atrocities, injustice, barbarity and cataclysms that destroy us, and He certainly doesn’t cause them to happen out of some tyrannical, sadistic desire to hear us praise him from the dungeons of our pain.

These are the truths the young believers (and unbelievers!) we care for need to hear. This is the personal, so-close, so-loving, so-wounded-by-our-wounds God they need to encounter through our words and see embodied in our out faith.

The God of Elijah is near, and He will triumph in the end. The God of holy wrath and immeasurable goodness, who whispers comfort in our storms and loves us into peace does not rejoice in our suffering. He aches with us. He groans with us. And He scatters flecks of gold amid the debris of our loss.

Fighting FIMO: Fear of Insufficient Ministry Output

DEFINING FIMO

You may have heard of FOMO—Fear of Missing Out. But if you’re anything like me, you might be living in the grip of FIMO.

FIMO is characterized by a fixation on productivity and exacerbated by a flawed accounting of the work actually being accomplished. It’s a syndrome that has pushed me to keep working in the evenings and over weekends recently—because when I look back at my week, I sometimes wonder if I’ve actually logged enough hours to warrant the donations that feed this ministry. So I add more hours where I can. As often as I can.

I suffer from FIMO: Fear of Insufficient Ministry Output. Perhaps you to too.

After several months of ignoring the affliction, my own FIMO came back into focus a few days ago when a person I was consulting with on Zoom ended our call by asking me what I’m reading right now. It’s a question that typically evokes a mix of embarrassment, defensiveness, and a soupçon of shame in me. I braced for her reaction and gave my standard answer.

“Actually, I don’t read much anymore.”

Cue the disappointment on my interlocutor’s face. “You don’t . . . read?”

I understood her confusion. She’d requested an online consultation because she’d read my most recent book and wanted to debrief it. She’d also mentioned a number of my previously-published novels during our conversation. She knew me as a writer and was rather nonplussed that this writer wasn’t a reader.

I quickly explained to her that I do, in fact, read. A lot. But my reading is professional in nature and usually not long-form. It’s informational articles and excerpts from longer tomes and summaries of recent research—all in the area of study that is central to my work.

FIMO is a persuasive and depriving force. It’s a small voice in my conscience that tells me that reading for fun robs me of time I should be committing to ministry. That reading for fun is self-focused and doesn’t serve the needs of others. That reading for fun is too trivial and ephemeral to be of any value.

That voice’s influence is exacerbated by an equally powerful trait found in so many ministry workers: an inaccurate measurement of what our output actually is.

RESISTING FIMO

Here’s the problem so many of us face: We tend to measure ministry output in finished products and final performances—not in the hours and days of work it takes to get us there. It’s like counting loaves of bread, but not the process it takes to gather the ingredients, weigh them, mix them, knead them, let them rise a couple times, then bake them. (Can you tell I’m in my sourdough era?)

That’s probably because we assume that people around us are using the same inaccurate metrics we are—looking at what we produce, not at what it takes to get there—and measuring our ministry by what they see.

This simplistic way of assessing our work is not an accurate measurement of our productivity. It is a dangerous perspective that leads to feelings of inadequacy, self-recrimination, and often—in an effort to counter both—burnout. It’s a near-constant pressure that inhibits our flourishing.

If Fear of Insufficient Ministry Output is so chronic in your life that it’s beginning to have a detrimental impact on your health and wholeness (mental, physical, spiritual), please hear me: Your wellness is important. Your relationships are important. You are important. Important enough to seriously reassess the motivations and lies that drive you.

Your ministry isn’t “just”:

- - The talk you give
  - The article you post
  - The session you lead
  - The conference you keynote
  - The sermon you preach
  - The food you deliver
  - The books you print
  - The event you host

If we measure our effectiveness by the number of loaves we produce and don’t include the process it took to get there, we put ourselves at risk of debilitating FIMO.

Yes, we must be good stewards of our time. Yes, our work output must align with organizational and practical expectations. But we must measure productivity wholistically. Resisting FIMO requires that we consider the entire process as we assess the sufficiency of what we do.

- - The brainstorming about future projects
  - The research on topics we need to explore
  - The conversations with people who are questioning their faith
  - The emails we compose offering insight and guidance
  - The editing process for an article we’re writing
  - The Zooms and phone calls to plan for future engagements
  - The multiple drafts in preparation for webinars
  - The one-of-kind inventions that support our one-of-a-kind work
  - The coffee & conversation with a new ministry partner
  - The YouTubing that teaches us how to edit sound and video
  - The planning and fine-tuning of travel arrangements
  - The crowdsourcing and surveying that contribute to our understanding
  - The writing and formatting of brochures and newsletters
  - The organizing and cleaning that keep community spaces welcoming
  - The reading and learning that keep us abreast of current concerns
  - The drives and plane rides that get us to our destinations

DEFEATING FIMO

I know that what I’ve been baking in the kitchen of my ministry is good, important, and worthy. But I’ve been assessing it all wrong, and the strain caused by ignoring the process and counting only the loaves sometimes feels overwhelming.

This is my entreaty to fellow ministry workers whose output compass, like mine, tends to point to “not enough”:

Count it all—not just the finished product and final performance. Remind yourself that your workload is more than what others see. And give yourself grace for all the unseen you juggle, so you can carve out enough space for the life outside of work you also need to flourish.

It is up to us to align our expectations with our loving Father’s, to set healthy boundaries for us and for our ministry, and when we reach them, to declare it “Enough.”

There’s a novel on my nightstand. A Christmas gift from my niece. It’s dusty and unread. I’m going to crack the cover right now and rediscover fiction.

The Gift of Need

“One of my favorite moments in Star Trek is when Captain Kirk looks over the cosmos and says, ‘Somewhere out there, someone is saying the three most beautiful words in any language.’ Of course, your heart sinks and you think it’s going to be, ‘I love you’ or whatever. He says, ‘Please help me.’ What a philosophically fantastic idea, that vulnerability and need is a beautiful thing.”
Hugh Laurie

Need is “a beautiful thing”? The statement didn’t sit well with me the first time I read it—mostly because I’ve spent the better part of my lifetime trying to avoid the implications of the trait.

Anecdotal evidence suggests I’m not the only MK and cross-cultural worker for whom the Gift of Need has become a defining fear.

The frequency of losses in our circles might be the most potent driver of our hesitancy around need. I’ve written several articles documenting the impact of the resulting grief on our friendships and relational outlooks. But what I haven’t discussed, perhaps because it’s a deficiency of mine, is how repeated losses affect our ability to need.

I work with Missionaries’ Kids, so they’re the usual subjects of my musings. But adults in ministry too often follow the same itinerary into needlessness. Here’s the way it works in MKs—and others:

The first few losses of our nomadic lives take us by surprise. Children are optimists by nature, and many of us assume, in our early grief, that our newest friend will stick around or that this time we won’t be the ones to leave.

Then comes the next departure, the next wrenching tug at already frayed heart-strings. As time goes on, the farewell tears become more bitter—acidified by an inevitability we can’t seem to control.

Years pass. The more we lose, the broader the wound feels. So we retreat into the fortresses we build with mechanisms intended to survive successive blows. Bastions designed to protect our fragility. Their walls are thick, their dungeons deep. So deep that Need can scream itself to hoarseness and not be sensed or heard.

We mask the moats and parapets with friendly smiles and skillful interactions, using adaptability to conquer social tests. We soften just enough to mimic a connection. But when the sun goes down, we flee back to our ramparts and watch, from out of sight, as less stoic throngs encounter, explore, embrace. Depend.

We pay no attention to the keening of Need as it brushes our subconscious. We’ve rid ourselves of its discomfort and its disappointment. We’re feeling strong—unbreakable. No more loves lost or relationships severed. None that matter, anyway.

We’ve sacrificed the Gift of Need to the comfort of isolation.

We do still allow some forms of Need into our lives—the disembodied kind. We’ll choose relationships in which others need us, but we need no one. In which others confide in us, but we confess to no one. In which others trust us, but we depend on no one. Because life—or God, or circumstance—has stolen our willingness to love and lose again.

The occasional friendship may sneak past our defenses. Reluctantly, we murmur “maybe just this one” and hope the goodbye, when it comes, won’t kill us. But mostly we hang back, observe, and try not to feel lonely.

We’ve conquered vulnerability and won a septic solitude.

Yet love—true, meaningful love—requires the Gift of Need.

Relationship is a three-sided form: one part common interests or focus, one part mutual enjoyment, and one part reciprocal need. Without that last element, we create a flimsy bond of similarities and pleasure, but leave out the impulse that draws us back to each other and fuels our willingness to risk intimacy.

I’m not immune to this distorted pattern.

Growing up in the goodbye-saturated world of ministry, I learned at a young age—when heartbreak drove me to a dangerous sadness—that I’d have to be more careful with my Need.

I became an adult who picked her friends carefully. As years stretched and they didn’t leave, I allowed just a little bit of Need to sneak in. When they honored it and met it, I surrendered a bit more.

Then life broadsided me. My strongest, longest friendship was severed by death. Brutally and unpredictably. My second-strongest relationship succumbed a bit more slowly—strangled by changes, busyness, and less utility. I learned that I needed her more than she needed me.

I railed at myself for having been deceived and, longing for the fortress of my youth, began to re-erect it. It didn’t take as long this time. Its walls formed a familiar cell.

So when unbearable pain rushed me to the hospital in the middle of the night some years ago and I slumped in a wheelchair for three hours waiting for a doctor, I didn’t make a call. I sat and moaned and tried not to pass out and wondered if I was dying. But I didn’t make the call.

In countless other ways since then, I failed to make that call. I’d built a shrine to independence on the quicksand of my Need—taking dangerous pride in proving to myself that I could live above it. Hoping to quell it. Hoping to control it. Hoping to eliminate it.

My story is not unique. The MK and ministry world is woven with survivors like me whose coping skills have led to a stunted form of Need, who manage to engage while preserving the isolation that protects them from the losses that destabilized their previous attempts at lengthy connection. We think our self-denial will protect us from more pain.

Yet Need kindles intimacy. Need fosters commitment. Need untethers trust. It’s a facilitator, not a dictator. A connector, not an abuser. A uniter, not a depriver. A cornerstone of friendship and a terrifying leap.

If there’s one thing our expat community of MKs and ministry workers values above all else, it’s relationship. Deep connection. And yet, we too often surrender one of life’s greatest treasures in an attempt to quell the risk of Need. It is too great. And our resilience feels too tender.

What a profoundly troubling trait. What immeasurable loss engendered by our attempts at mitigating loss.

It was shortly after my hospital encounter with chosen isolation that I began to contemplate a change. Not only to add an emergency-contact person to my crisis Rolodex, but because I realized how very alone and stranded I’d become in my quest for low-liability connection.

My ventures into linking my true self to others were tentative at first. Resilience-building and courage-stoking. And over time, despite the inevitable losses of this uncommon life I’ve chosen, I’ve learned that Need is not the enemy. It is an invitation—into connection, compassion, and authentic community. It nurtures trust, deepens intimacy, and dismantles the illusion that we were meant to hold ourselves together alone.

This is what I wish I’d known earlier in life: strength isn’t found in stubborn independence. It’s found in shared humanity. If Jesus—God incarnate—lived in need of companionship, touch, rest, and support, how much more permission do we have to seek the same?

So I continue learning. Relearning. Unlearning. I am trying to speak honestly when things are hard, to ask for presence instead of pretending, to believe that my needs don’t burden the people who love me. And day by day—connection by connection—I’m discovering that what I once saw as a liability is actually the sacred gift for which I’ve been seeking.

This article is also posted on Michèle’s website. Her new book about understanding MKs and TCKs, Pieces of Purple, is available from Amazon.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash.

Transition Wisdom from a Sage Called Pooh

Transitions are inevitable in the expat life. At best, they’re portals that can usher in change, adventure, and growth—and at their worst, resistance, resentment, and withering. I’ve read the books, perused the articles, and listened to the podcasts. There are so many valuable insights about change to be gleaned from others on parallel journeys! But I’ve also found that there can be something powerful in learning from less conventional sources—sources that disarm our solely cerebral search for clarity and engage our imagination.

So this is by no means an academic thesis on the subject of transition. It’s a closer look at some of Winnie-the-Pooh’s honey-soaked wisdom about looking for light, forming foundations, and finding our friends. I’m fairly sure A. A. Milne would be surprised to see his bear’s words used in this unconventional exploration, yet I suspect that his beloved character was well acquainted with the topic—and I present this quote as irrefutable evidence: “I’m not lost for I know where I am. But however, where I am may be lost.” ¹ A more accurate description of mid-change living has seldom been spoken!

(Note: though most of the quotes here are directly from A. A. Milne’s writing, several others are from later works and adaptations. See footnotes for sources.)

LOOKING FOR LIGHT

“I always get to where I’m going by walking away from where I’ve been.” ⁵

The obvious problem with moving to new places is that we’re forced to leave other places behind. The losses are huge, often measured in increments of “knownness” and “homeness.” Of relationships too—the kind that used to sustain and define us. There’s just no getting around the ache of those partings. Winnie said it best. “How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” ³

There’s a tension in those words. A challenge to cling to enough clarity as we say hard goodbyes that we can be thankful for what has been, even as we mourn it. Being able to frame our pain as both grief and gratitude doesn’t dull the ache, but it allows a gleam of something divine into its overwhelming grayness.

The mindset we bring to the impending leap can be helpful as well. Eeyore said, “It never hurts to keep looking for sunshine.” ⁶ And Piglet concurred, in his own squeaky way. “I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” ¹

How wise they are. Intentionally turning our minds toward some form of hope, even as we grapple with daily new-world hurdles, can make the difference between resilience and defeat.

Winnie’s own words are a reminder to stay open to good things. “If it’s not Here, that means it’s out There.” ⁴A conscious predisposition to expecting good things can be both an inoculation and an antidote for some of the hardships of transition. If we can keep looking for the silver linings—not only searching for them, but believing we’ll find them—we’ll be able to experience the seasons in which we feel disoriented or lost as passages that lead toward something good.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t value in sitting in the pocket of today. There is honesty and purpose in living squarely in the present, even as we remember yesterday’s challenges and anticipate the gifts that may still lie ahead. In Winnie’s words, “Today is my favorite day. Yesterday, when it was tomorrow, it was too much day for me.” ³ That’s a sweet way of saying, “Congratulations. You made it to yesterday’s tomorrow. And that’s no small achievement.”

When the toll of preparations, planning, and goodbye’ing bleeds into the current moment, reminding ourselves of how much we’ve overcome to reach the “now”—of the courage and grit that brought us to the new phase we’re beginning—can be a calming and strengthening thing

FORMING FOUNDATIONS

Once the practical and logistical details of the move are behind us, reality sometimes sets in with a thud. We try to prepare ourselves so we can avoid huge mistakes, but there’s no escaping the occasional stumbles or cultural faux-pas.

“If possible, try to find a way to come downstairs that doesn’t involve going bump, bump, bump, on the back of your head.” ¹

Those of us who have lived cross-culturally might be confident in the skills we’ve developed, but even those don’t make us stumble-proof. If we consider our missteps to be failures instead of giving ourselves grace, we’ll add shame to the already taxing task of transition.

Taking risks is good. Using our cross-cultural skills is great. And giving ourselves permission to not do things perfectly can be downright redemptive. After all, “What’s wrong with knowing what you know now and not knowing what you don’t know until later?” ⁴

Some “bump, bump, bumps” will be inevitable as we attempt to find stability while straddling worlds. But that’s not the end of the story. As owl put it, “If the string breaks, then we try another piece of string.” ¹ Reaching for those new strings can feel messy and uncertain, sometimes even embarrassing, as transition-seasoned missionaries and MKs—but every bump is also a step forward.

And then there’s faith. There’s no overstating its value in our universe-hopping seasons. When it feels like the places, purposes, and people who were our foundation have been ripped away, the unchanging and ever-present nature of God is the most anchoring of truths.

Though our tendency, in those times, might be to focus less on faith because there’s simply so much to do as we adapt to a new life and environment, prioritizing spiritual nourishment can be a stabilizing gift to discombobulated emotions. As Winnie likes to say, “I’m never afraid when I’m with you.” ³To be honest, “never” feels too strong a word. At the risk of offending Pooh, my suggested edit would be: “I’m less afraid with you.” Given what I’ve learned about transition and faith, that feels just about right.

FINDING OUR FRIENDS

And then there’s the challenge of building new relationships. Even that can feel like it requires too much effort when we’re pouring out so much just to make it through the day. One of the most dangerous side-effects of transition is isolation—which in small doses might be healthy for people like me who so value aloneness. But when it becomes chronic, we lose the human connection designed by God for both fuel and healing.

Reaching out isn’t without risk, of course. How many of us have tried repeatedly to find a kindred spirit and either been rebuffed or ignored. After numerous failed attempts—or just from lack of social energy—we might find it so much easier to stop trying.

I understand that reticence. I’ve lived it. And I’m embarrassed to admit how often I’ve reached disparaging conclusions about the people around me in order to support my own inaction, labeling them shallow or self-centered for not responding the way I expected.

If only I’d had Winnie-the-Pooh as a mentor in those frustrating transitional phases. “If the person you are talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.” ¹ I’ve learned that that “fluff” could be all kinds of things that have nothing to do with my quick assessment of other people’s shortcomings.

Only time will determine which “Acquaintances of Unknown Status” will become the friends we’re hoping and praying for—the kind to whom we might say, “Being with you feels just right.” ⁶ The patience it requires to wait for that kindred soul might feel futile, and yet: “Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” ²Because, after all, “Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.” ²

Along with patience, relationship-building will often require initiative—even in times when it feels like too much effort! But, “You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.” ¹

I frequently tell the MKs I work with that taking the initiative will look different for each of us. For extroverts, it might look like joining a club, crashing a party, or walking up to strangers and starting a conversation. To introverts like me, though—or to exhausted extroverts—it might just mean putting ourselves in places where connection could be possible and making sure we look available for someone else to speak to us. There are seasons when that’s all we have to give. And that’s okay.

There are no easy remedies for the discomfort and disruption of our biggest transitions. The challenges and sticking points will be unique to our temperaments and contexts, and the way forward dependent on so many variables.

But there is hope.

I encourage you to be honest in your own self-assessment. To use accurate words for the day-to-day stresses you’re feeling. To speak to others who have been there before you and let their “after picture” breathe some light into the hard place where you find yourself today. Learn from their mistakes and adjust their strategies to your situation. And even as you’re putting out that effort, bring your concerns to the God who cares and listens, because you’re not alone and his help and wisdom are just a prayer away.

And as you muddle through, remember this affirmation from one of our lesser prophets: “You’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” ³ If you need a reference for that verse, you’ll find it First Christopher Robin, Chapter…something-or-bother.

Perhaps this quote from Charles Spurgeon is a more appropriate place to end. It’s been helpful to me: “The seasons change, and you change, but your Lord abides evermore the same, and the streams of His love are as deep, as broad, and as full as ever.”

To that, Winnie and I say a heartfelt, “Amen.”

Quote sources:

1. 1. A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh (1926)
  2. The House on Pooh Corner (1928)
  3. Pooh’s Grand Adventure (1999)
  4. The Tigger Movie (2000)
  5. Winnie-the-Pooh film (2011)
  6. Disney adaptations

Don’t miss the audio version on the Pondering Purple Podcast, available here. This article is also posted on Michèle’s website. Her new book about understanding MKs and TCKs, Pieces of Purple, is available from Amazon.

Photo by @hiimnik on Unsplash.

Attachment Styles and the Faith of MKs

I began studying Attachment Theory a while back. The deeper I dug, the more I realized its possible implications for MKs—how our relationship with our parents can shape our Attachment Style, and how our Attachment Style in turn might shape our relationship with God.

Attachment Theory is a complex topic with layers of fact, perspective, and nuance involved. And it certainly isn’t original to me—countless books have been written on the scientific research that has illuminated its realities. So please consider this merely a conversation starter. I’ll try to break some of the key concepts down into bite-sized pieces, but I encourage you to continue your own research as you seek to apply these theories to your understanding of yourself as an adult TCK or to the children you’re raising as TCKs.

I hope this overview will do for you what it did for me: shed a clarifying light on the relational dynamics of my very early years and how they impacted both my future relationships and my faith.

In the interest of brevity, I’ll leave you to read more about the history of Attachment Theory in the original article and podcast I’m linking below. But for now, let’s take a look at each of the four Attachment Styles.

The Four Attachment Styles

In the ministry world, the fact that our parents serve God will be intrinsically linked with any exploration of Attachment Styles. To the MK mind, if God inspires our parents’ work, values, priorities, and passions, it’s easy to assume that he inspires their parenting too. And the security or insecurity it builds into our psyches might just as easily be attributed to God himself.

It’s important to remember that Attachment Styles represent a framework, not a guaranteed outcome. Unusual personality traits, unique circumstances, or strong relationships outside the core family could divert a child’s Attachment Style from what would otherwise be predictable. The research into this topic identifies reliable trends, not universal truths.

1. Secure Attachment

This Attachment Style is characterized by confidence, optimism, and vulnerability in relationships. This kind of security is fostered by parents who are consistently present, loving, supportive, and reliable—particularly during those critical early childhood years when a sense of value, importance to others, and safety in relationship gets imprinted on our spirits.

A TCK with this form of attachment will feel comfortable with both closeness and independence. She’ll trust others and feel worthy of love. She’ll have the capacity to form healthy and lasting relationships.

The core question for Secure Attachment might be: Why wouldn’t I believe that someone can love me?

2. Anxious Attachment (also known as Preoccupied Attachment)

Anxious Attachment is characterized by uncertainty about our worthiness. This is often related to parents who were not consistent in the attention and care they showed their children—sometimes available and involved, and sometimes distracted or absent. The child with this Attachment Style yearns for connection but gets stuck in a pattern of trying to earn it somehow—because he learned early in life to question his value and lovability, as well as his ability to maintain the attention and commitment of others.

A TCK with an Anxious Attachment style will still reach for closeness, but fear rejection and abandonment. He might appear more needy than others. Be overly sensitive and insecure in relationships. It can show up in contradictory ways too: in inordinate clinginess or in a self-sabotaging impulse to end relationships before the other person has the chance to reject him.

The core question for Anxious Attachment might be: Is there anything about me than can earn consistent love?

3. Avoidant Attachment (Dismissive)

Avoidant Attachment is characterized by low (or no) expectations. It is a mirror of the absence of caregiving that person experienced as a child from relationally unengaged, dismissive, or seemingly uncaring parents.

Though we all by nature have a deep-seated longing for true connection woven into our DNA, the avoidant person will convince herself that she really doesn’t want or need any form of vulnerable relationship. She’ll tell herself that it probably won’t be returned anyway. And that it’ll hurt a lot less to live without hoping for more.

A TCK with Avoidant Attachment will prefer relational independence to connection and closeness. She might come across as ultra-self-sufficient, aloof, and disinclined to emotional intimacy.

The core question Avoidant Attachment Style might be: Why would I ever think that someone could care for me?

4. Disorganized Attachment (Fearful/Avoidant)

Disorganized Attachment is characterized by relational inconsistency. It shows up as volatility in relationships—like a desire for closeness paired with fear of vulnerability. Or in contradictory behaviors—like drawing someone close only to push them away. Where Anxious Attachment desires connection and tries to earn it, Disorganized Attachment has a pattern of opening the door to attachment then slamming it.

A TCK with Disorganized Attachment craves connection as desperately as he fears it. He’s confused by his early relationship with caregivers, set off-kilter by their unpredictability, instability, and chaos. Sometimes there was love. Sometimes there was contempt. Sometimes he felt nurtured and sometimes it seemed those entrusted with caring for him didn’t even know he was there.

When parents are neglectful or dizzyingly mercurial, the adult whose understanding of relationships was formed in that uncertainty will apply the same pattern to future relationships.

The core question for Disorganized Attachment might be: Why should I risk trusting or depending on anyone?

The Impact of Attachment Styles on the Faith of MKs

As I’ve sat with this research for the past few months, I’ve wondered how Attachment Styles might also impact our faith. The Bible, after all, uses the term “Father” to describe God, and faith is primarily framed around relationship with him.

Looking back at my own life, I can see how the defense mechanisms I learned in my early years were directly reflected in my approach to God—how they complicated and undermined it. I’ve seen the same challenges in the MKs I work with.

But I want to affirm that an Attachment Style is not inflexible—whether it be in our human relationships or in our faith. There is room for growth. For hope and for healing. For reimagined connection with others and with God—the Father who can disarm the self-defenses we might have learned in our ministry-saturated childhoods.

God the Father is a comforting image for so many believers, conjuring care, provision, and presence. Those who have experienced human parents who loved them well will easily project those same traits onto the spiritual being also referred to as Father.

But for people who spent their early years with caregivers whose love they perceived as less than fervent, committed, or dependable, our understanding of the word “Father” could trigger the same unhealthy Attachment Styles we learned in hard childhoods. And we’ll assign to him traits that will validate our fear or hesitancy around a dependent relationship.

Those of us with insecure Attachment Styles may even narrow our reading of Scripture to just those stories and descriptions that legitimize our misgivings, not out of conscious self-deception, but as a form of subconscious self-protection—reminding ourselves that he may not be safe. Our expectations of who God is can indeed be shaped by our early human relationships.

If we grew up with Secure Attachment, we’ll be able to go to God the Father with confidence, knowing that he sees and loves us, that he wants our flourishing, that he is patient and kind and faithful. That’s what we learned from growing up with our own parents.

And the Bible will validate that perception. We’ll dwell on the passages where Jesus shows his goodness. Where he is present and comforting. Where he heals and provides. We’ll look back on our lives and see his “Fatherness” in the blessings we’ve experienced—and our sureness about his father-heart will allow us to place responsibility or blame for the harm we may have endured along the way on other forces and factors. We know that fathers love their children and can be trusted.

The faith statement for Secure Attachment might be: Since my own busy, missionary parents found a way to make me a priority, I know the Father they serve will too.

If we grew up with Anxious Attachment, we might question whether we’re truly lovable to God. There were times when our parents treated us like precious gifts to be cherished and nurtured, and times when we couldn’t seem to hold their attention. So we might expect the same from God, wondering if he loves us in a devoted way or if there’s something we need to do to earn relationship with him and care.

And in our minds, the Bible seems to validate this view of God. There are verses in which God’s love shines right off the pages—where we see him moved by the need, fear, and deaths of others. But there are also the passages where he rages against humanity. When people beg for him to see and hear them, but he doesn’t seem to. We might bypass the “in his own image” message of Genesis that paint us as good and beloved and see ourselves instead in the passages where we’re called fallen and unworthy

The faith statement for Anxious Attachment might be: I don’t think there’s any way that I can earn God’s love—but I’ll give it a try.

If we grew up with Avoidant Attachment, viewing God as the Father might paint a picture of someone who doesn’t even know we exist. We don’t think relationship is possible because we don’t think we matter enough for him to take time away from saving the world to pay attention to our needs and concerns—let alone abide with us in everyday ways. “Father,” in our Style vocabulary, means uninterested and unreachable.

We resonate with David’s statement that “God doesn’t care! He has closed his eyes and will never see me!” (Psalm 10). Our prayers have gone unanswered. We’ve witnessed tragedies in which he didn’t intervene. We’ve lived through trauma inflicted by people claiming to act in his name. And we’ve never sensed his compassionate eyes on us.

The faith statement for Avoidant Attachment might be: My own missionary parents didn’t show any desire for connection with me as they served God the Father, so I can’t expect anything different from him either.

And if we grew up with Disorganized Attachment, the notion of relationship with God feels dangerous. We honestly don’t know whether he is kind or cruel. Yes, we’ve seen him do great things for places and people. But we’ve also seen him angry and vengeful.

And we can find evidence of that in the Bible as well. The God who created the universe and said it was good then destroyed it with a flood. The God who loved Mary and Martha let them suffer at the death of their brother. The God who said, “Let the children come unto me,” allowed Herod to kill thousands of babies.

The mercurial parents we knew seem reflected in what we’ve learned about God the Father, and our faith will mirror that. We may love and need him one day, but fear and distrust him another. Or both at the same moment. That makes it impossible to really commit.

The faith statement for Disorganized Attachment might be: I never knew what version of my parents I was going to get, so I’m going to go ahead and trust the Father as long as he seems trustworthy, but I’m going to bail the moment he’s not . . . until I need him again.

Hope for Insecure Attachment Styles

Here’s the good news: Attachments Styles can shift. There’s some debate about whether they can be “reprogramed” vs. “managed,” but there is clear evidence that we are not condemned to a life controlled by early relational self-defense mechanisms. It may not easy and it likely won’t be quick, but it can happen.

I should know.

For most of my life, I was stuck in a powerful form of Avoidant Attachment, both in my personal relationships and in my faith. Looking back, I can see the cost of that kind of self-protection in so many ways.

But I can also see how people who followed Jesus and loved me well began to soften my rigid stances. How an honest acknowledgment of parental shortcomings gave me the freedom to reach much less grief-bound conclusions. How therapy and worship and incremental changes drew me small-step by small-step into a healthier and “realer” vision of who I am, of who God is, and of what can be both released and learned from former relationships.

Although healing is a process that plays out until our last breath, I can attest that the person I am today is so much more secure in my relationships and so much more dependent in my faith.

The path to wholeness and more secure attachment will be different for each of us. On a human-to-human relationship level, finding freedom and rewriting our patterns might involve a collection of approaches:

- - Pursuing personal self-compassion and growth
  - Finding help through therapy or support groups or both
  - Intentionally entering friendships with trusted people who understand our tendencies and whose healthy attachment styles won’t force us into repeating known patterns
  - Exploring and internalizing the unconditional love of God as expressed in his Word and demonstrated in his Son

There are so many resources that address healing in this area—books, podcasts, scientific articles. I’ll leave it to you to search for the ones that are written/produced by reputable sources and apply to your specific scenario.

But healing is possible on a spiritual level too. There are a number of approaches that may be helpful if this is what you’d like to explore for yourself. Note that this is not prescriptive! The following are suggestions of possible first steps on a much longer journey that you’ll want to tailor to your situation and needs:

- - Examining how the Attachment Style developed through our parental relationships might be coloring our view of and engagement with God
  - Processing our relational influences and behaviors through honest conversations with trusted friends who might see in us what we don’t
  - Seeking help from appropriate forms of counseling, in order to move toward spiritual renewal and freedom from past scars
  - Praying for God to reveal his true self to us through what he shows us in his Word and in his Son’s life, in whatever “language” our soul hears best: Scripture, music, nature, conversation, art, science, or narrative
  - Learning more about his heart for us as we look back and find him already woven into our story
  - Gradually—as our capacity grows—investing more of our trust in him, finding him worthy, and then investing some more

Our Attachment Styles are symptoms—self-defense mechanisms—not immutable traits. They can soften. They can bend. They can be redeemed into something honest and good.

This is the truth I want MKs to live in.

Parents of still-growing TCKs, I hope you haven’t read these words as an indictment or as judgment. We can only do what we know. If this is new information for you, I encourage you to dig deeper into this topic, to examine your practices, and to check in with your children about what they’ve learned from your parenting and how it might have colored their perception of God. Growth is a continuum, and it’s never too late to start.

My prayer is that we’ll all, whatever our status or stage of life, be attuned to our own needs, aware of any unhealthy self-defenses we harbor, and mindful that the way we care for others, especially children, might inform their understanding of God. His love is not dependent on our worthiness or determined by a capricious willingness to engage.

It is steady. Sturdy. Without conditions and undimmable.

~~~~~

Want to learn more? Here are some suggestions for a place to start:

- - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠What It Is and Why It Matters⁠, podcast by Adam Young
  - ⁠The Impact of Attachment⁠, by Susan Hart
  - ⁠Attachment Theory⁠, by Thais Gibson (interactive book)
  - ⁠Secure: How to Have a Secure Attachment to God⁠, by Kenza Haddock

You can find the extended version of this article and podcast episode here.
Photo by Dan Dennis

The Incredible Power of Positive Childhood Experiences

If you’ve followed my writing for a while, you may remember my article on Adverse Childhood Experiences or ACEs. In that piece, we explored new research by TCK Training that measured the amount of toxic stress MKs and TCKs experience, and how it matches up with the stress of young people in other communities.

Further exploration of the topic for my upcoming book, Pieces of Purple, pointed me to Positive Childhood Experiences (or PCEs), a powerful balancing tool that might mitigate the impact of ACEs in global nomads’ early years, while lessening the imprint of ACEs in their adult years.

MKs and TCKs whose PCEs are powerful enough to retain their brightness despite the darkness of any Adverse Childhood Experiences will be able to acknowledge the Hard without losing sight of the Wonderful.

In my work with families, I’ve found it helpful to categorize Positive Childhood Experiences as either Bright-Impact PCEs or Profound-Impact PCEs—two terms I coined to help define their differences. They can help MKs to more easily identify the positive events and environments that have supported their wellness and help parents to craft a plan that blesses their children with both.

BRIGHT-IMPACT PCEs

Bright Impact PCEs are significant and important. They’re more short-lived experiences that temporarily bring joy and comfort to children. Just as an accumulation of small-T trauma can have a powerful negative influence on young minds and spirits, an accumulation of Bright-Impact PCEs can have a powerful beneficial influence on the minds and spirits of MKs.

For global nomads, those Bright-Impact PCEs will vary with the details that make our stories unique—with each home country, each family dynamic, each glowing memory, each story of personal suffering, overcoming, and thriving. We might joyfully remember:

- - - The sound of monsoon rains on our home’s tin roof
    - Providing food and shelter for thousands of refugees
    - Bringing sustainable farming to war-ravaged places
    - Spending entire days with our friends on public transit in bustling, safe cities
    - Seeing a baby who had hours to live being nursed back to life in a tent hospital
    - Witnessing nationals graduate with degrees in theology, music, or ancient languages, to take the reins of ministries in their own countries
    - Riding motocross bikes over a sea of sand dunes
    - Digging life-saving wells where water is scarce
    - Cutting the ribbon on a new school building
    - Eating a meal cooked over smoldering manure
    - Creating lodging and paving roads and extending bridges in Jesus’ name across gaping divides between countries, people, and faiths
    - Learning to cook a traditional meal from a best friend’s abuela
    - Watching the northern lights reflect on a nearly-still ocean

PROFOUND-IMPACT PCEs

While Bright-Impact Positive Childhood Experiences might be compared to the chimes and piccolos in a TCK’s symphony, Profound-Impact PCEs are more like the timpani and contrabass. They are foundational family practices and external systems that will influence Global Nomads on a deeper level, fostering a sense of safety and a capacity for hope that are indispensable for resilience and emotional stability.

Research into this phenomenon has shown that survivors of trauma who can identify 6 to 7 Positive Childhood Experiences (the Profound-Impact variety) in their formative years will be 72% less likely to experience depression or mental health challenges later in life.

This data positions PCEs as essential counterweights to the detrimental impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences. They can actually protect against some of the negative future outcomes ACEs have wrought in the lives of TCKs.

There are seven Profound-Impact PCEs parents can cultivate—both in the family culture and in the broader environment—to multiply joy-giving influences in their children’s lives. The more of these positive experiences TCKs are offered, the better their chances will be of avoiding trauma-triggered mental health challenges in the future.

1. 1. 1. Being able to talk with their parents about their feelings—having Mom and Dad validate emotions, ask follow-up questions, and offer comfort.
    2. Experiencing the support of parents during difficult times—Mom and Dad being physically present, engaged in the situation, and ready to go to bat for their children as needed.
    3. Enjoying family traditions in which they regularly participate—finding predictability and stability in celebrating milestones and special occasions together.
    4. Feeling a sense of belonging in a high school setting—having a place among their peers, being involved in extracurricular activities, and feeling socially connected in this critical phase of development. (This obviously would have to be adapted for home-schooling children.)
    5. Being supported by friends—finding inclusion and self-esteem-boosting relationships with peers who aren’t related to them.
    6. Being genuinely cared for by at least two adults (coaches, mentors, teachers, or friends of the family)—their value and worthiness being validated by adults who invest time and love in them.
    7. Feeling safe and protected by a parent in the home—knowing that at least one parent is there to shield them, meet their needs, and empower them, while striving to maintain emotional security inside the home.

Some of these Profound-Impact PCEs can be cultivated by parents wherever the family serves—with open communication, intentional action, right priorities, and child-focused wisdom.

But life doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The temperaments of individual children, past trauma they’re carrying, family dynamics, and the social and geographical environment they’re living in will also play a role in the availability of Positive Childhood Experiences.

In some cases, making sure a son or daughter receives sufficient PCEs will require parents to increase their intentionality in areas that need attention.

In others, it may force them to make heart-wrenching sacrifices for the best of reasons—the kind of changes that protect the current and future wellness of global nomads at the cost of changing locations or communities, and sometimes even leaving the ministry.

Given the gentle care and focus Jesus showed to children—as well as his admonishments to love them well—making hard and heartful decisions for the sake of a suffering child may be the most Christlike of PCEs those who love MKs can offer them.

FINDING ONE’S FOOTING BETWEEN ACEs AND PCEs

There’s no doubt that we’ve been gifted so much good by growing up as TCKs. What we’ve accomplished and seen, what we’ve learned and assimilated. All priceless.

We wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Some MKs have also been confronted with realities beyond our capacity to handle. We’ve witnessed atrocities or shouldered excessive stress or survived dangerous events or lived with unhealthy alienation and uncertainty.

Yet we still wouldn’t trade the good parts for the world.

I personally experienced family dysfunction, sexual abuse, severe depression, suicidal ideation, and an anxiety disorder during my growing-up years.

Yet I too wouldn’t trade the rest of it for the world.

Grief and joy.

Floundering and flourishing.

ACEs and PCEs.

They exist in tandem in the lives of so many TCKs.

And parents can help their children to find their footing at the intersection of the Wonderful and the Hard. Permission to express struggles, relationships capable of receiving the truth, resources to help process with a knowledgeable guide, and faith in a God who understands and cares—all of those can shine stability, true resilience, and a healthy outlook on self and on God into the complicated existence of children who grow up cross-culturally in the often-challenging world of ministry.

________

Pieces of Purple—the Greatness, Grit, and Grace of Growing Up MK will be available for purchase in April, 2025! To be informed of the exact release date and pre-order your copy, please subscribe to my blog using the form on the right side of this page.

TCKs & Six Forms of Belonging

“If you came back, you wanted to leave again. If you went away, you longed to come back. Wherever you were, you could hear the call of the herdsman’s horn far away in the hills. You had one home out there and one over here and yet you were an alien in both places. Your true abiding place was the vision of something very far off, and your soul, like the waves, always restless and forever in motion.” —Johan Bojer

I’m not sure there is another people group on earth that relates to “home” in as complicated a way as the Third Culture community does. Home is kaleidoscopic for us. The savors, smells, sounds, textures, and lifestyles of our past hum like static in the background of our present. We live in a state of perpetual nostalgia. Those places that have crawled inside our consciousness, the languages that have told our stories, the cultures that have rippled around and through us, the remembered agony of imposed goodbyes and mandated transitions—they are anchored to our DNA and embedded in our cells.

And they are Home.

But they are not a single space. As Tolkien wrote, “We feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”

Home, for us, is muddled and meaningful in its indescribable, life-defining sense of identity. Sometimes it buoys and charms us. Sometimes it challenges and bruises us. And sometimes it reminds us that we can’t return again. The pain of that discovery can be a visceral ache.

Whatever its manifestation, we all, to some degree, carry the blessing and burden of our previous planets as we dwell between past and future. Some of us try to silence or ignore the melancholy longings for an us-shaped, soul-familiar place. Others of us let the yearnings drain the color from the newest sphere we’ve entered.

While Home is most simply defined as a significant place of formative bonding and shelter, Belonging is the sense of wholeness and likeness we might find in that place. Yet so often, we struggle to discover the sturdy and lasting social sameness and communal embrace we seek. Further complicating our pursuit for that stable, intimate, and life-giving form of connection is the fact that we may not have experienced it in a significant way during our mobile formative years. How are we supposed to find something we cannot recognize?

Though an ache for Belonging is built into the human experience by our Creator, for some of us TCKs who don’t feel that a complete sense of “wholeness and likeness” with one culture will be possible, Belonging might remain an individual notion—customized to each personality and life trajectory. It will also remain a flexible concept, as whichever form of Belonging we choose in one season may not be the one we carry into the next.

I’ve witnessed six major incarnations of “customized Belonging” in the MKs I serve. Each comes with distinct pluses and minuses attached it. None is without challenge. Regardless of the sticking points, each will—if only temporarily—meet our deeply human, intrinsic need for the kind of Homeness that makes us feel welcomed, valued, relevant, useful, validated, and hemmed.

Nuclear Belonging

In their youth, some MKs will center their sense of Belonging in their nuclear family—that’s those who are fortunate enough to find their most trustworthy source of love, attention, and meaning among parents and siblings. They’ll declare that Homeness exists wherever mom and dad are, where each member of the family contributes to forming a self-sufficient unit, intensely bonded and devoted. Those children know that though the world around them will inevitably and continuously change, their family’s fabric is both sturdy and elastic enough that the vagaries of life and ministry will not destroy it.

Kindred Belonging

Other MKs will find Belonging in a subculture of kindred spirits—MK schools are a prime example of this. How many of us have found a comforting form of sameness in these spaces where our backgrounds may be different, but the way those backgrounds shape and inform us is a powerful shared trait?

That connection to others whose lives have been as rich in cultural inputs and experiences as ours is something we may continue to pursue in our adult years, seeking community with people who have lived between worlds, as we have, and whose perspectives are as broad and nuanced as our own.

Diverse Belonging

In contradiction to Kindred Belonging, I’ve found that some MKs begin to find a sense of self in pursuing difference rather than similarity. In this case, Belonging will feel like the variety they knew while growing up between worlds. Between the colors, cadences, and curiosities that charmed and challenged them. There will be something familiar—something they recognize and identify with—in circles where there are few people who resemble them, and they’ll derive such energy from navigating those waters.

These are the MKs who spend their lives moving from new environment to new environment, because they feel such profound Homeness in places where they’re outsiders.

Activist Belonging

The intense drive and purpose of our formative years will lead some of us into social spaces where we feel a similar kind of energy—a communal laser-focus on addressing a serious concern together. Because so many MKs are desperate not just for community but for intense belonging in a community, they’re prone to search for it in circles that are militant or marginalized, because the fervor of activism feels so familiar and galvanizing.

These MKs in search of a tight and focused social embrace might leap into the deep end of new communities without always assessing what they’re getting themselves into. And once they’re in, even if there are reasons to second-guess their decision, the sense of belonging they find might feel so good that they won’t follow an impetus to step back out again.

Relational Belonging

Other MKs won’t truly experience Home until they find it in a stable, bilateral, committed relationship—like marriage or something similar. It’s my suspicion that this is often a factor in MKs who choose to marry early. They see the future as a place where Belonging may be difficult to find and prefer to quickly latch their lives onto a known and loved entity rather than risk floundering in their pursuit of something that could prove less dependable.

Internal Belonging

This is the incarnation of Belonging I’ve found most helpful as I’ve navigated life between worlds. With Internal Belonging, the quest for an external sense of Homeness becomes less of a preoccupation, because we realize that the places and people that formed us are an active, living force we carry within ourselves—not something we need to reproduce in our current context or in the years ahead of us. Our many homes are planted in our spirits, informing our understanding of life and the world, offering an internal sense of belonging, even when its external form is difficult to find.

Though Internal Belonging is by nature less connective than other forms of integration, it can be a helpful alternative if we reside in circles where External Belonging isn’t possible—or isn’t yet possible. It can calm the dissonance we feel when parts of our identity are shadowed and remind us of the precious, multi-faceted Homeness our mobile lives have offered us.

There are likely other variations on Belonging among MKs and TCKs, but these are the ones I encounter most frequently. If you have the time for some introspection, I encourage you to consider what I’ve outlined here and determine which variation is the most present in your life. And then contemplate what its advantages and disadvantages might be, so you can thoughtfully manage its helpful and more harmful side effects.

I need to add that although as humans we are wired for Belonging, there are certainly times in our life when accepting unbelonging will be preferable to choosing a dangerous facsimile.

Our natural search for belonging and Homeness is so complicated. So dizzying and—in many cases—unsatisfying. Until I considered the spiritual reality of Home and Belonging, I consistently struck out in finding that profound sense of—as I mentioned before—being “welcomed, valued, relevant, useful, validated, and hemmed.”

It’s in beginning to view my relationship to God as my Home that I’ve found a bit of an answer to the complexity and grief of my homelessness and unbelonging. By digging deep into what’s in God’s heart for me—comfort, joy, hope, direction, goodness, truth—I’ve learned to center that in my daily reality, and in doing so have found a constancy that transcends time zones and cultures.

I know that faith can be just as complicated as Homeness to so many MKs, and not all of us walk away from our experiences with an intact faith. But if we can pitch our nomad’s tent on the unchanging foundation of who God is, how he sees us, and what he wants for us…perhaps then the lostness so often associated with a TCK’s mobility will find solace.

If we can set our goals according to his heart and find our fulfillment in cultivating his benevolent intentions, the kaleidoscope of our past will find a present and future purpose that doesn’t require a constant redefining of “Home.”

Will I still feel loss when I remember my past communities? Of course, I will. Will I still crave familiarity and connection to the places I once knew? Without a doubt. The hunger for Home and Belonging is human, universal, and good.

Being wrapped in God’s presence and inspired by his heart doesn’t eliminate the yearning, but it soothes and redirects its sting. And it grants global nomads like me the mobile stability of soul-intimacy.

[To listen to the audio version of this and other articles, please follow the Pondering Purple podcast or click here. Find more of Michèle’s resources and novels at michelephoenix.com.]

A Loving Letter to Missionary Parents

Missionary parents, I want to begin by honoring you and affirming you.

You are raising families in complicated cross-cultural settings that are at once exhilarating and exhausting. You’re managing so much: the pressures of work and language-learning and support-raising and communicating with your ministry partners and learning the intricacies of assimilating to new places and reinventing the wheel every day while maintaining your core values and sense of purpose.

You’re constantly evaluating and redirecting, finessing, pushing through, and educating yourselves—all while striving to be present and engaged parents to your children, who themselves are going through a “purple” version of what you’re experiencing, without the clarity of having been grounded in one culture during their formative years. (See this article for an explanation of purple.)

I want you to know that your courage and commitment, your juggling and rejiggering, your galvanizing and growth are seen and celebrated! Your effort and stick-to-it-iveness are beautiful.

At the same time, I want to draw your attention to something you may not be fully aware of. Consider it a glimpse into something that may be happening in your MKs without your knowledge.

This cautionary message was brought into focus for me as I watched the recent Summer Olympics. Like millions of spectators, I was glued to the coverage of the US Women’s Gymnastics team’s comeback in Paris. Between footage of soaring, twisting, and miraculously landing athletes, the channel I was following showed just a few seconds of the watch party at the World Champions Centre in Texas, where Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles have perfected their trade.

The brief clip pulled me up short. I wound it back a couple times, enchanted by the pint-sized gymnasts sitting on the floor in front of the television, mimicking every pose and facial expression of their heroes competing on the big screen. The announcer explained that both the children and the superstars train together, and almost by osmosis, the younger athletes end up learning the entire routines—move for move—of the women they hold in such high esteem.

Like those tumbling tykes at the World Champions Center, the children observing ministry’s pommel horse and uneven bars are learning about life by observing and, even unconsciously, internalizing the “routine” they see you performing.

This can particularly be true when it comes to faith, and the domino effect of what they witness can run the gamut from elevated spiritual awareness to diminished spiritual interest.

I had a Zoom conversation a while ago with an adult MK. Her name is Laura, and I share this part of her personal journey with her permission. Laura is twenty-six. She has a great job in the medical field. She’s in a stable relationship and loves her nieces and nephew. She gives back by working for a local charity that provides groceries and fuel to families living in underserved communities.

Laura is well-spoken, insightful, kind, welcoming, and generous—everything you’d expect her to be, having grown up multi-culturally, steeped in the values of a family devoted to serving.

But she doesn’t want anything to do with God. And an uncomfortable, pained expression crosses her face when the topic of ministry comes up.

Laura finds God neither appealing nor necessary. She laughed when I asked her to explain how she got there. The problem, she said, wasn’t a dearth of information. God had saturated her life from earliest memory. Even her bedroom wallpaper, before her family headed to South Central Asia, depicted scenes from Noah’s Ark and Eden.

Laura knows all the stories, but as she grew up observing the missionary world, the character of God became confusing to her.

On a good day, God was the “boss” who gave her parents their assignment—tasks to complete and events to plan. Jesus seemed to her to be her parents’ job. The name they tried to slip into conversations with the butcher at the market and the carpet salesman at their front door. The same name they uttered in perfunctory pre-meal family prayers that seemed more habit than gratitude—except when others were watching and the prayers morphed into Psalm’esque poetry.

On not-so-good days, God’s persona felt like something ominous to Laura. The identities she described were painfully real to her but stand in stark contrast to the God I know.

God the dictator—he made her family move six times in seven years, twice to a place her parents didn’t want to move but did, only because they were the only solution to an urgent need.

God the miser—the family prayed and prayed for better income, and still support flagged. There was one particularly memorable evening when their home group spent time interceding for their financial needs, and while they were praying an email came through finalizing the discontinuation of support from one of their main partner churches. The irony of the timing was not lost on Laura.

God the taskmaster—rest was slothful in Laura’s family and community. The God she was shown despised leisure and immobility. Laura witnessed her parents so fixated on endless ministry demands that their ability to be present with their children—aware of their needs and engaged in their growth—was limited.

God the exploiter—Laura’s father had to seek medical help for work-related exhaustion. Twice. He was hospitalized for a few days the second time, and Laura feared she’d lose him to heart issues that hadn’t existed prior to the stress of ministry. His chief concern while lying in bed hooked up to monitors? The tasks adding up while he waited for tests to be run.

God the isolator—whether it was entertainment, friendships, or aspirations, everything in Laura and her two sisters’ lives had to be overtly spiritual in order to be approved of. If it wasn’t, there would be no participation allowed for them. Birthday parties, school outings, even reading—it all had to be God-centered, or it would be parent-denied. God’s grip over their lives eventually caused what Laura called “religious isolation” or the inability to exist in external community.

There were equal parts sadness and anger in Laura’s voice as she recited her litany of dark God-images. What she had learned about God, she’d learned from observing her parents. And her parents may not have realized what she was witnessing in them. What they’d unwittingly taught her was that the One they served was a tyrant who required malignant levels of output from a family he failed to protect and provide for.

He seemed to Laura to be all disinterest and demand.

I tried to keep my voice neutral as I asked Laura a series of questions. Her answers were shrugs, head shakes, and the same one-syllable word.

Did you ever see your parents resting in God’s love and provision?

Did you see your parents finding comfort in him?

Did you witness your parents wanting to spend unstructured time with him?

Did they ever articulate or demonstrate an intimate, life-giving relationship with him—beyond the toll of tasks and obligations?

No. On all counts—no.

I’ve had the same conversation with other MKs, and Laura’s response is sadly too common.

“But…they’re missionaries!” the idealist might say. Yes—and this is one of the grave dangers of God being a career choice. I know that terminology sounds cynical, but when ministry work overwhelms personal relationship with Jesus, faith can so easily cede to a form of mere religious employment.

Dr. John Trainer wrote: “Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.”

As an MK who has worked with MKs for more than three decades, I can attest to the faith-preserving importance of that statement. The difference I see between children who were a demonstrable priority and those who were not is vivid.

Missionary parents, you are so commendable for following a calling into a life that is as unusual as it is unpredictable. An important life too—in eternal ways that are hard to measure from the present vantage point. I admire you so much! I also want you to know that your relationship with—not employment by—Jesus will inform your children’s faith in powerful and indelible ways.

The work you do and the sacrifices you make—your public sermons, service, and courage as you endure the desert-lands—will certainly contribute to what your children learn about God. But, like those young gymnasts following Simone Biles’s routine, they’re watching everything you do—perhaps especially outside of official obligations—and it’s in your abiding with Jesus (not performing, doing, or accomplishing) that they will catch a glimpse of what true faith is.

So have you talked with your children about conversations you’ve had with Jesus lately?

Have you mentioned in casual interaction that you’re seeking his guidance on difficult decisions?

Have they seen you reduce some of your workload because it was getting in the way of quality time with him—and with them?

MKs need to learn by observing you about the benevolent goodness of God. They need to glimpse his heart for them in the way you rest in his heart for you. They need to understand his nearness and kindness by witnessing your vulnerability as you look to him for comfort, restoration, and inspiration.

God’s primary calling on our lives is not that we overachieve for him, but rather that we live in intimate relationship with him. Those children watching faith’s “gymnastic routine” from the edge of your life’s tumbling mat are internalizing what they see and will likely repeat it. They’re learning who God is by observing your faith, and they’ll grow up to reflect what they’ve seen as they make their faith their own.

Dictator, miser, taskmaster, exploiter, isolator… These are nearly sacrilegious characteristics often unwittingly conveyed by grown-ups who don’t realize young souls are paying attention.

For the sake of Laura and others like her, I urge you to let your love for God, your enjoyment of his presence, and your dependence on his goodness shine more brightly than the list of obligations that metronome your days.

Treasure him above all else.

Bask in his kindness.

Recuperate in his fullness.

Rely on his strength.

Display his love by finding fulfilment and satisfaction in your relationship with him, though tasks will always await and trials will always lurk.

Demonstrate that he wants you to pause and refresh by doing exactly that—by stopping long enough to renew your strength and connect with your children.

Reveal his compassion for them and his attention to their needs by regularly considering the impact of your ministry on your own kids—debriefing honestly and regularly, individually and as a family, so you know where they stand and they know that you care.

Missionary parents, your children are watching. They’re seeing the miraculous, the life-changing, and the life-sapping.

I know you’re weary. I can’t imagine the balancing act of raising children while involved in taxing ministry.

I know your spirit often seems to bow under the weight of your responsibilities and burdens.

I know the life you’re chosen can be depleting in every way imaginable.

But that God you’re so frantically serving? You define him with every choice you make.

May his true heart be able to shine through the lived expression of your faith. And may your children hunger for what they see in you—the comfort and fulfillment of living in relationship with a mighty, close, and attentive God.

[To listen to the audio version of this and other articles, please click here.]

Disordered Work Ethics in Ministry

I struggle with rest. More accurately, I battle the guilt I associate with rest. And I know it comes from two significant pieces of my identity: the MK part and the missionary part. Perhaps this is why the story of Loïc Leferme struck me as a wake-up call when I first saw a documentary about his life.

Loïc Leferme is a French world-record holder in freediving. To be more precise, he’s a dead world-record holder. Leferme passed away in 2007 while trying to beat his own 561-feet depth record with no respiration devices . He had only the air in his lungs as he was propelled downward by a motorized pulley system.

I was instantly fascinated by Loïc’s story — not so much by his underwater exploits as by the sheer obsession this man had with finding the limits of his physical and mental capacities, then surpassing them over and over. Each dive was Loïc’s death-defying statement that nothing was too much for him and that he would not let the universe determine what he could and couldn’t withstand.

One of the last questions asked of him in the documentary was a perplexed, “Why do you do it?” Loïc’s answer was sobering. With a soft, awe-filled smile, he said: “I cannot stop until I’ve found how far I can go.”

No one knows exactly what happened the day Loïc died. After eight minutes under water, he was found unconscious by his best friend and trainer, slowly floating back to the surface where his wife and children waited in inflatable crafts.

He had found his body’s limits. And finding them had destroyed him.

Extreme Ministry
There have been times in my life when I’ve wondered how deep my own Loïc Leferme tendencies go. Back in 2017, fresh off major surgery, I mentioned in a newsletter that I was dealing with an unexpected setback in my recovery.

The next day, I received an email from a friend: “I am not your counselor, your mentor or your doctor — but perhaps your body is trying to slow you down just a little so you can give yourself appropriate time to recover.”

That email brought an uncomfortable epiphany. It had felt good to get back in the saddle after being sidelined by illness. To return to my pre-surgery routines. To say “Yes!” as often as possible, defying the “Nos” that had been imposed on me by my diagnosis. But as I read her words, I realized that I’d actually been drill-sergeanting myself into something I call “extreme ministry.” And it wasn’t a new thing.

For the majority of my years serving Missionaries’ Kids, I’ve given in to a compulsion to keep pushing the limits of my human endurance in an attempt to earn the approval of the God who called me and the communities that watched me, and to appease the fear of failure—the fear of lessness—that haunted me.

There was no verse I could point to that said, “You will be rewarded for working yourself so hard that your body and spirit give out.” There was no written or spoken message that told me that burnout is a measure of true faith. But somehow, I’d absorbed that subliminal, toxic messaging so much in my youth that it was permeating my adulthood.

What are some of the unhelpful messages that get whispered in missionary communities and unwittingly passed down in missionary families? I asked the 1,200 adult MKs of a group I moderate to chime in, and these are some of their answers:

- - People don’t give for us to sit around doing nothing
  - The appearance of slothfulness is bad for our ‘brand’
  - We should always be available, no matter the hour or day
  - “Newsletter pressure” – proving to supporters that something is being accomplished with their funds
  - We must work hard for Jesus in order to appease Him, minimize His wrath, and improve our chances of having prayers answered
  - “I’d rather burn out than rust out!”
  - Folks back home are sacrificing and working extra to support us, so how can we do any less?
  - Things such as time off for recovery, setting personal boundaries, taking a break/vacation, and focusing on family needs are seen as secondary to “kingdom work”

Essentially, the motivating message is this: pour yourself out until you have nothing left to give. This is the mark of a faithful believer. This elevates you in the eyes of your creator. Your conscious self-destruction is good and noble.

The mission field is littered with the remains of Loïc Leferme types who found limitation-shattering to be an exhilarating “sport”…right up until it became a devastating curse. And the victims aren’t just the missionaries who devote themselves to a quest for superhuman achievement and are willing to sacrifice their physical, mental, and spiritual health to their efforts. Among the MKs I work with today, I see a spectrum of work-ethic-dysfunction that bleeds into their adult years and sometimes gets passed down to their own children.

People who live under a constant barrage of pressure to do more and be better will tend to respond in one of two extremes. They will either do all they can to perform beyond their capacity—no matter the cost—or they’ll choose to divest themselves entirely of any obligation or inclination to succeed. I’ve seen both archetypes in the population I serve.

They become either broken overachievers or deliberate underachievers. Both responses represent seriously disordered thinking.

Crushing Depths
When I arrived in Germany in 1991 to work as a writer for Black Forest Academy’s communications department, I came with the full understanding that BFA also stood for “Be Flexible Always.” So when the director dramatically changed the plan on my first day, I took it all in stride.

Looking back, the conversation is mostly a blur. I was told, in essence, “We need you to teach two levels of high school English, two levels of middle school French, direct the school play and the high school ensemble, and commute every day from France while attending all of BFA’s events and developing relationships with the students… Oh, and you’ll volunteer in the dorms too. You can do all that, right?”

The missionary neophyte in me nodded dumbly and considered the assignment an honor. What followed was a two-year spiral that started with exhilaration and ended in something close to abject despair.

Having grown up watching adults sacrificing health, relationships and longevity to their ministry, I didn’t question the wisdom of throwing myself headlong into the insurmountable job description I’d been assigned.

I was the Loïc Leferme of the mission world for those two first years at BFA, pushing past my boundaries over and over again, allowing into my life the kind of stress and over-commitment that absolutely crushed me. By the time I realized what was happening, I was utterly spent.

Fighting the compulsion to overdo it is hard, particularly when it has spiritual overtones. Saying, “I can’t do that” feels like a shameful admission of weakness or ineptitude—of insufficient faith. And in an environment where everything we do is supposed to be for others, it also feels self-absorbed and unworthy.

I know you’ve met the people I’m describing. Maybe you’re one of them — the good, dedicated servant-hearts who push themselves so hard for so long that they can’t withstand the strain. The committed Christ-followers who sacrifice their family’s well-being to the poisons of absence and overwork. The missionaries and MKs who have floated back to the surface—fractured and ashamed—after failing to be indestructible.

We’re all susceptible to Loïc’s desperate drive to find and exceed our limitations “in God’s name.”

We do it out of conviction and devotion. Leave it all on the field, right? It’s all for the Lord, and He demands everything from us. We may also do it because, rightfully or not, we feel the scrutiny of others in our communities, and we fear their condemnation if we fail to live up to their conception of how busy and overwhelmed a “good” Christian should be.

For people who are meant to live as Jesus did, we’re awfully quick to overlook the example he gave us. Even the Son of God had to take breaks from a ministry in which he was literally saving lives during his time in a human body. If people were healed by simply touching the edge of his garment, think of how many more could have survived whatever was plaguing them if he hadn’t taken the initiative to go off alone.

Yet he did exactly that. He gave himself permission to take a step back, instructing us by example to do the same when it is wise and necessary.

We are so quick to quote verses about our bodies being “a temple” when it comes to managing our diet and exercising more, yet we too often forget to treat them as such when they demand restraint and rest .

Stepping back feels self-protective and not others-focused enough. Yet our self-monitoring and self-care need to be fully engaged at all times if we’re to escape the “benevolent decay” caused by unchecked busyness and damaging do-gooding.

It’s a tension I live in every day. As an MK. As a missionary. As a single woman. As a survivor. As a fragile human with finite strength. Yet I believe it’s out of obedience to God that we must make wise decisions about our investment in work and ministry. That we must protect ourselves from over-commitment and exhaustion. That we must acknowledge that it’s okay to slow down when necessary, to push less, to stop long enough to notice those who depend on us who are waiting on the surface of our calling—peering into the depths of our excesses, hoping we’ll swim back into their lives when we come to our senses.

Preventable burnout is not heroic. It is mismanagement of the capacities and calling God gave us. And having needs is not a flaw—it’s a feature of God’s design in us.

Essential Sabbath
In Wayne Muller’s excellent book, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal and Delight in our Busy Lives, he wrote: “If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath—our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us.”

He’s not saying that God will cause illness to punish our excesses. He’s saying that the breaking of our endurance will force us to rest. And that rest is God ordained and God pleasing.

Loïc Leferme’s tragic example can be a cautionary tale that prompts us all to greater self-reflection and to dependence on God for wiser self-management. Our God is a God of love and kindness, one who made himself human and knows the limitations of bodies best fueled by sleep and silence and serenity and self-control–bodies for whom laughter and leisure are as important as passion and purpose. As important as details and deadlines and all the “doing” that is a good thing, but not the ultimate thing.

In The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer makes this brilliant point: “Corrie ten Boom once said that if the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy. There’s truth in that. Both sin and busyness have the exact same effect—they cut off your connection to God, to other people, and even to your own soul.”

I can’t imagine a more grievous loss.

From Striving to Thriving
I have only one fragile body to rely on for the years of life God gives me. One heart to invest in the people with whom he’s entrusted me. One soul to commit to a flourishing relationship with him. That is a fact for every one of us.

Despite the compelling voice of guilt trying to dissuade us , we must find a way to love ourselves as Jesus loves us. We must recognize the necessary boundaries he reveals to us in times of stress and pain. We must monitor the spiritual and emotional fault-lines through which he speaks to us of lack of margin.

We must surrender our compulsion for “doing” and “surpassing” to his whispered assurance that He’s greater than our best efforts and endlessly forgiving of our shortcomings. He delights in us whether we accomplish much or nothing.

We must choose and practice living both proactively and protectively, sacrificing for those we love, but not seeking significance in spiritualized self-harm. And we must rest in the certainty that God loves us so much more than he needs us.

If you’re the Loïc Leferme of whatever context you inhabit, might I suggest these five small considerations that have begun to help me? Until we curb our tendency toward extreme ministry, we will continue to teach disordered work—which is evidence of a disordered heart—to the impressionable souls watching us for guidance.

1. 1. Study the importance of rest as demonstrated and described in the Bible: the emphasis God places on the Sabbath and the way Jesus embodies wise boundaries.
  2. Pause regularly and for long enough to find stillness and listen to God’s voice.
  3. Assess your needs and health (physical, emotional, spiritual) at regular intervals, maybe even giving those who love and know you best the permission to speak of the harmful compulsions and idols they see in you.
  4. Experience the wisdom and blessing of saying wise “Nos” for all the right reasons.
  5. Surrender your drive for measurable achievement and enter instead into intimate relationship with the Creator who desires not only your faithfulness, but your flourishing.

As we negotiate the demands of complex lives in which obligations, relationships and time seem to compete with each other, my prayer is that we’ll discover that sweet spot where Jesus is our refuge and serving him our joy–where obedience yields health and striving yields thriving. That we will become, with focus and practice, a God-delighting, faith-cultivating and family-preserving testament to well-ordered living.

I pray this for myself.

For the families I serve.

And for the MKs I love.

Mostly Belonging: Hope for the MK

When I was little, I’d snuggle up to my mom in the evenings and listen to her reading Are You My Mother?, attracted to the plight of the children’s book’s melancholy protagonist in a way I couldn’t fully comprehend. In the story, the baby bird falls out of her nest and wanders from cat to tractor to cow and car, repeating her increasingly urgent question: “Are you my mother?”

Without realizing it, I identified with her pain. The sensation of lostness was all too familiar to me, even at that age.

When I saw a copy of the book in a store a few weeks ago, my instant reaction was an urge to reach through the glossy cover and comfort the hapless hero. I saw a bit of me in her—a lifetime spent wondering if new places and people groups would be my “mother,” my place of belonging and sameness.

In many respects, MKs are not much different from this feathered fellow. We hover between clusters of those who know their place and fit their social contexts, hoping that someone will want us or include us despite our difference. We try to act like it doesn’t really matter. Or we try to be tough and endure it. But we still live our lives in a more or less conscious pursuit of belonging.

“I will never belong” is a sentiment I’ve heard expressed with varying degrees of rancor and drama in my thirty years of MK ministry. Of all the traits Third Culture Kids and Missionaries’ Kids share, I think this one is among the most powerful.

It is born of multi-cultural, multi-national, multi-experiential and multi-identificational backgrounds that both expand our worlds and limit our full adaptation to any of them.

One of my first conscious thoughts about my TCK identity came at a young age, when I realized while on furlough that I’d never be fully American, and that the French would never consider me fully French, either. There seemed to be no place on earth where I could feel that I fully belonged. Is it any wonder that MK communities like schools and mission conferences become such a haven of sameness to MKs?

Unfortunately, having experienced that level of identification can also set us up for a lifetime of discontent, because—and I don’t want to sound pessimistic—it is a sense of wholeness we may never know again.

Multi-cultural dwellers face three distinct options in their quest for belonging.

The first is to conform.
The second is to intentionally unconform.
The third is to straddle the cultural divide.

Let’s start with conforming. In some ways it’s the easiest option, and MKs are fairly good at it, at least on a surface level. We’re observers by nature. Whether it be trying out a new fast-food restaurant or voting in elections for the first time, I still live by the old motto: watch first, act second. I’ll relinquish my place in line as often as I need to until I’ve figured out how “normal” people do it and can proceed as they do.

That’s really just cultural savvy—or practical conformity. The kind that spares us public embarrassment and the kind of social faux-pas we desperately try to avoid. A complete conformity is a more dangerous version of the classic MK ability to adapt. In this case, we’ll either consciously or subconsciously discard those parts of ourselves that link us to other cultures and modes of life in order to be fully American, fully European, or fully Asian.

The danger in full conformity is in what we have to relinquish to achieve it.

You’ll see this in the MK from Rwanda who moves to Canada and wears nothing but Rwandan garb as an outward sign of her allegiance to her heart-home. You’ll see it in the Turkish MK who refuses to return to his passport culture and stops using English—thereby losing contact with the North American branch of his family and identity. Or the TCK in her passport country who never refers to the foreign places that framed her worldview and shaped her personality.

In order for me to have fully adapted to my French culture or to my Canadian passport culture, for instance, I would have had to alter my appearance, my political views, my gender-role opinions, my culinary tastes, and some of my social behaviors to achieve what that culture expected of me.

Once I was finished erasing the old and embracing the new, there would have been very little left of the richness of a multi-cultural upbringing: the broadened understanding and artistic/social/political palette that is so unique and so prized in TCKs.

Conformity would have cost me every bit of the beautiful complexity that can come from being an MK, but it would also have earned me a sense of belonging and sameness. For that sense, MKs can be willing to sacrifice an awful lot.

The second response to unbelonging is unconforming. It’s a fascinating phenomenon to me and it goes something like this: “There’s no way I’m ever going to fit in. People on both continents tell me I’m weird. Weird in Brazil. Weird in Korea. Well, let me show you weird.” And the MK sets out to be as odd as he or she can possibly be.

It’s a self-defense mechanism that has serious back-firing potential, but I can see its appeal. Whereas being the victim of our difference feels painful and unpredictable, being the architect of the difference gives us a sense of control.

So we exaggerate our weirdness in order to call it a choice, not an affliction.

Sometimes it’s strange clothes, sometimes it’s eccentric behavior, sometimes it’s threatening attitudes, weird tastes or social misconduct. On some, it’s endearing. On others, it’s off-putting. But to MKs whose identities have been shattered and rearranged without their volition, it’s a sense of finally being in control of how the world perceives them.

So when someone’s expression says, “You’re weird,” they can pat themselves on the backs and consider it mission accomplished, because they’ve made “difference” a choice, not an painful condition.

But…they’ve also made that elusive “belonging” even more impossible to achieve.

The final response to unbelonging is straddling. It’s probably the healthiest of the three belonging options, though it is certainly not the easiest.

It requires that we celebrate “mostly-belonging.” It keeps us intentionally connected to the cultures and subcultures that have shaped us while investing and implanting in the one in which we live.

Straddling allows us to retain all those facets that lend depth and breadth to our identities while mostly adapting to the new places life takes us. In order to successfully straddle cultures, we’ll have to understand and value each of them, retaining those other-culture quirks that are acceptable in the place where we currently are and disengaging those that might be jarring or misunderstood by the locals around us—at least initially.

Straddling requires that we add new facets to our panoply, not as a rejection of what we’ve known before, but an expansion of our cultural arsenal. It is also a means of honoring the culture in which we’ve been planted. For instance, moving to Germany and not alienating our neighbors may require that we regularly sweep sidewalks that don’t need sweeping. Living in other places may require more modest dress for women. And yet others may require a “bribe” column in our budgeting. These are adjustments we can make without releasing the influences that made us who we are.

Mostly-belonging isn’t a repudiation of the multi-cultural aspects of our identities—it’s a thoughtful, intentional choice to embed in the culture we now live in, and an equally intentional choice to stay connected with the other cultures we carry within us.

An initial carefulness and adherence to social norms will usually yield a more successful integration than, say, waving a Greek flag and refusing to eat anything but olives and feta! As relationships deepen and our friends know us better, we’ll be able to broaden our expressions of multi-culturalism without alienating others.

Straddling or mostly-belonging requires that we relinquish the baby bird’s dream of full, uncompromising sameness. As MKs, we’re actually healthier when we accept that we won’t ever be completely one or the other of our natures, when we acknowledge and celebrate those ways in which we can fit in, and when we set out to live enthusiastically in that space between belongings. That’s what makes us unique, broad-minded, tolerant, chameleon-like and prized bridge-builders in whatever society we embrace. That’s what allows us to thrive as TCKs.

With that attitude—with that self-awareness, intentionality and openness—true connection becomes possible, and a new, richer and healthier form of belonging can be ours.

Guiltitude: the Guilt of Having in a World of Sacrificing

My pastor got a car.

His van was totaled in a wreck and, just as he and his wife were considering what it would take to finance a new vehicle, someone they know offered them a Volvo.

This past Sunday, he spoke with awe in his voice about the miraculous provision for his family. Then he emphasized that the car was well above their means and added, “I don’t want anyone to see the car and think, ‘Wow, my pastor can afford a Volvo?!’”

I turned to the friend sitting next to me and said, “I hate that he had to say that.” Then I remembered how often I’ve done something similar.

I’ve noticed the syndrome before—I’ve lived it. And it has reached epidemic proportions in the world of missions. Even among the MKs I serve, I see it embodied every day, inherited from parents who might not have realized the lessons they were teaching.

Guiltitude [noun]

Condition in which guilt overwhelms gratitude—most commonly observed in those who are dependent on charitable giving—aggravated by fear of judgment, often resulting in calculated communication and/or conscience-stricken self-restriction.

CONFESSIONS OF A GUILTITUDER
When I moved back to the States from Europe, I found my elation over God’s provision of my townhouse tempered by strong feelings of guilt.

Though I could document every miracle that had paved the way to my new home, I still struggled with the guilt of “having” when I lived in the ministry-universe of “sacrificing.”

I wondered if guests would see my flea-market European antiques, bought for $50 but worth hundreds in the US, and question whether they’re appropriate for a missionary’s home. I found myself wanting to explain things by saying, “This was given to me by a friend” and “I bought this for next-to-nothing at a charity store in Alsace” as I gave tours of my two-story miracle.

Even today, nearly ten years later, as I look around this home and see the items contributed by the outrageous generosity of friends, I am assailed again by that uncomfortable combination of paralyzing guilt and galvanizing gratitude.

I live in the land of Guiltitude.

Guiltitude is not a uniquely Phoenix notion either. Though it doesn’t afflict all missionaries, it impacts enough of them to warrant some attention. Its symptoms are wide-ranging:

Missionary to Germany relinquishes the old, beat-up Mercedes he was given (for free!) by members of his local church and invests his own funds in buying a less “brand-y” car to avoid looking ostentatious.
Missionary to Switzerland, while interacting with his supporting church, avoids speaking of the recent purchase of expensive editing software, though much of his ministry relies on producing music and videos.
Missionary family scores $25 plane tickets to fly to Monaco for spring break. They post only a handful of pictures taken in the wealthy Principality, but are sure to thank the discount airline and the person who offered them cheap housing when they do. You know…just in case.

When I lived overseas, I vividly remember talking with a friend who had, for a year, bought virtually no furniture for her home. I asked her if she planned on getting a couch and kitchen table at some point, and she said, “My supporters send me money for ministry, and getting furniture is not ministry!”

Like so many others, she’d bought into something I call Donor Demand. There’s an old-school component to it. We like our missionaries to look deprived and to live without. It adds a certain nobility to the minister’s status and to the giver’s sacrifice.

You might be amazed at the rigid (and sometimes irrelevant) standards by which the validity of a missionary’s work has been judged. Owning a Mercedes and serving in a beautiful location are just two of the numerous reasons for which devoted financial partners have been known to rethink—and sometimes withdraw—their crucial donations.

Guiltitude can be hard to diagnose, as it often masquerades as responsibility or humility. Its most obvious symptoms are:

Fear of having (because true ministers, by some accounts, must live in squalor)
Fear of doing (because some activities may be misunderstood as frivolous)
Fear of full reporting (because some ministry partners may misread the value and purpose of what is owned and done)

I’ve seen all three reach irrational levels in MKs who grew up in an environment where financial guilt of some sort prevailed. Even their adult relationship to money and ownership can be irreversibly skewed by the toxic influence of Guiltitude.

[Note: it goes without saying that there are instances in which missionaries truly have lived in excessive or dishonorable ways and been rightfully confronted about it.]

In my own life, I’ve found how easy it is for guilt to sneak into a spirit of gratitude. I am so grateful for God’s provision of my every practical, physical and spiritual need since I began in ministry in 1991—and for the donors whose gifts have kept me serving for these twenty-nine years!

That gratitude pushes me every day to be worthy of their sacrifice…but it also contributes to a creeping sense of guilt. How can I invest the funds I receive from supporters, who often give sacrificially, on things that are less than essential? Why should I buy a thrift store buffet or the used car of my dreams when others can make do with cardboard furniture and a 16-year old beater?

TREATMENT
I’m afraid I don’t know whether there’s a permanent cure for Guiltitude. Something tells me it’s a chronic disease that lurks in subconscious places. Perhaps a good place to start is for both sides (the servers and the givers) to acknowledge its existence, then treat its symptoms with a healthy dose of truthful assessment. If nothing else, this may at least mitigate Guiltitude’s damage.

May I offer a few additional suggestions?

Missionaries:

Remind yourselves that you are called both to live and to serve. For most humans, living well requires rest, some level of comfort and the occasional escape. It’s okay to enjoy places, things, and activities that are financially responsible. You are not supported just to do a job, and there is growing evidence that self-care leads to greater longevity on the field of service.
Report clearly and intentionally, not out of guilt, but out of a desire to accurately inform those who follow your ministry.
Surround yourself with a smaller, understanding group of friends with whom you can share parts of your life that you don’t reveal on social media or in letters. This will keep you from feeling like you’re being deceptive. You’re just being selective.
Counter irrational disapproval with facts and assert truths that contradict flawed rationales.

Supporters and onlookers:

Understand that the occasional treat (activity, trip, unnecessary object) may actually enhance the missionary’s ministry, because it contributes to emotional and physical wellness.
Don’t apply to your missionaries restrictions you wouldn’t apply to yourself.
A poor, burned out, or suffering missionary is not more godly than a comfortable, healthy, and happy missionary.
Remember that the pictures you see only tell part of the story.
If you must speak with a missionary about what you think you’re seeing, begin by gently asking questions and truly listening with a compassionate heart.

As I sit today in my modest and comfortable home, surrounded by treasured bits and pieces of my years overseas, I am grateful for three decades of ministry rich in locations, accomplishments, and experiences. I am also aware of the challenges that come with the blessings. My commitment to myself, as I contemplate the opinions of others on what they see of my life, is to thoughtfully consider legitimate causes for concern, to adjust my choices (when appropriate) out of faithfulness to God, and to prayerfully let go of unfounded accusations—even those I inflict on myself.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Don’t miss the Pondering Purple podcast, available on all your streaming platforms. In each brief episode, I highlight one of my articles in a format you can consume on the go.