Category: Michèle Phoenix

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.

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. 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

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. 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. 

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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.

9 Ways MKs Can Navigate Their Grief

Someone asked me, recently, why there is such an emphasis on grief and loss in my speaking on MK topics. The answer is simple: they are highly influential emotions experienced by a majority of MKs. A young man named Muki, who recently transitioned back to his passport country, articulated it best:

I’ve lost my home, my security, my church, my friends, my job, my relationships… It continues to haunt me that I will never see the places that I roamed in the same light again, nor will I breathe the air as someone who is planted there. I lost myself in the convoluted mission of leaving. There is no way to express how lost I feel, and I don’t think anything can change that. No amount of crying or talking will heal my soul. I feel like grief has become my love language.

I’ve already written about the effect of grief on the lives and outlook of MKs (see here) and on their relationships (see here). But this article is not a recipe for avoiding grief. Much as I would love to be able to offer cure, I probably wouldn’t even if I could—because it is in the roiling center of grief that understanding and growth reside.

So this article is not about circumventing the lostness that often walks hand in hand with the treasure of a multi-cultural existence. It’s about managing the shadows we carry within us, so we can remain functional and connected while slowly disentangling the roots and rewards of our grief.

 

A note for non-MKs:
Those who repatriate to their “home” country aren’t just moving from one state or province to another. They aren’t just losing a measurable number of people, places and “sacred objects.” It’s the intangibles that exacerbate their grief and intensify their response to it. Missionaries’ Kids who are enduring transition have lost the languages, sounds, aromas, events, values, security, familiarity and belonging that have been their life—an integral part of who they are and how the view the world. When they leave their heart-home, it feels as if they’re surrendering their identity too.

Moving back is more than a transition for many MKs—it’s a foundational dislocation and reinvention that can take years to define and process.

 

A note for MKs:
We’re too often in a hurry to put the Hard behind us so we can get to those more “acceptable” stages of grief, praising God for the healing and using what we’ve endured to help others.

Here’s the problem: if we slingshot our way over grief or find strategies to get through it fast, we don’t actually process it—we merely shove it deeper, allowing its power to intensify and its control over our outlook, self-assessment and relationships to increase.

When we understand our losses and their impact on our lives—through the process of discerning what they are, how they shape our view of God and self, and how they can lead us both to greater strength and dependence—only then can something beneficial and beautiful come from the bitter pill of the goodbyes inherent to the life of an MK.

 

1. Redefine your relationship with grief.
There’s a tendency among us to see it as a weakness, a shameful lack of faith. We tell ourselves we should be able to bounce back and embody resilience.

The truth is that what we’ve left behind is monumental. And our feeling of lostness, as Muki put it, is a haunting thing. Yes, grief can feel debilitating, but it is also the measure of our love for the distant world—the intimate home—we’ve lost. Not only is it okay for it to hurt, but it is necessary for it to hurt.

 

2. Let your grief breathe.
Give it the time and space it needs to reach a natural ebb. Pain is not our enemy. It points us to the tender spot that needs our attention and grace. It exists for a purpose, and any attempt to suppress it will only cause more harm in the future.

When I meet with adult MKs who are still struggling to figure out their lives, we never fail to uncover some measure of unresolved grief. They thought they were being expedient, in their youth, when they decided to ignore it or live above it. This allowed them to function and move on more easily, but it also left the darkness of their loss anchored to their life’s perspective.

Grief is not reduced by our attempts at stuffing it. It only builds under the surface as we neglect it, then erupts more violently when it finally finds release. If we let it breathe, we give ourselves the chance to heal.

 

3. Don’t stuff it, shelve it.
As important as it is to make sense of our grief, it would be detrimental to our health (and our deadlines, social engagements, job…) to be constantly processing it. In order to function in the real world, we might be tempted to “put a lid on it”—to tamp down the emotions, screw the lid on tight and make believe there’s nothing there to think about. I assure you that nothing good comes from that approach.

What I do advocate is learning to “put it on the shelf.” Picture a transparent jar, its lid just resting lightly on top of it, sitting safely on a shelf within my range of vision. It’s still there. I can see it. I can hear its whisper. I’m still aware that I need to pay attention to it. But it’s out of the way for now, within reach when I need to go back to the healing process.

Shelving grief isn’t denying it, it’s managing how much and when it gets our attention. Resilience comes from returning to it again and again until it has been fathomed and restored.

Note: there may be moments when something triggers an overflow that cannot be “shelved” and needs to be addressed immediately. That can sometimes be part of the grief journey too.

 

4. Speak about it to someone who cares and hears you.
This is another reason why learning to manage the processing is important. We need to be careful in choosing people to process along with us. If we don’t learn to shelve the grief, we’ll look to the first person who enters our life to be that voice of compassion and support.

It’s wiser and safer to wait until we’re sure of the person we’re inviting into our sadness. That person needs to be someone we respect, who has proven himself/herself trustworthy and who has demonstrated wisdom and compassion.

There’s nothing wrong with communicating on this topic with someone from our past, and modern technology certainly makes that easy. But that person can’t be the only sounding board we have. There’s something beneficial about speaking to someone who lives in our here-and-now too.

Consider professional help as well. Counseling can be something of a taboo subject in missionary circles. We’ve got God and we’ve got that vaunted “MK resilience”—we don’t need an outsider’s help, right?

Here’s the thing: grief is powerful, murky and unpredictable. A person engulfed in the tides and turbulence of dark, raging water may not be able to extricate him/herself without the help of another person whose feet are firmly planted on the sturdiness of the dock, able to throw in a life-saving buoy.

That’s who counselors are. They may not fully understand what we bring to the situation, but they’re solid, they’re clear-minded, they’re eager to help, and they’re equipped with tools we may need to overcome.

 

5. Explore who God is.
Study God’s heart as revealed in his Word and through those he sends into your life. Remind yourself of his promises—they’re not limited by time or place. They were true in your old world and they’ll hold true in your new one.

God is still present. He is still speaking to you—though it might be hard to hear him above the roar of your coping mechanisms. His promise to fight for you and comfort you still stands. Look back over the road you’ve traveled and see the way he has been faithful, then remind yourself that he has not changed, though your circumstances have.

If you’re like me, there will be a tendency, in your darkest moments of grief, to blame God for what caused it. “If you hadn’t called my parents…” “If you had provided what we needed to stay overseas…” Blaming God for the hard stuff makes him into your tormentor—and it’s impossible to seek comfort from the same being we also accuse of everything that harmed us.

There will be time to understand his role in our circumstances when the crisis is passed, but when we’re coping with overwhelming loss, his presence is the most powerful aid we can reach for. He is not ashamed of our sadness—he experienced it too.

Though there is comfort in activity, friendships, rest and accomplishment, there is nothing and no one who comforts, understands and heals grief more deeply than Christ.

 

6. Remember who you are.
It’s so easy to feel that we’ve lost our identity, that all that’s left of us is the bruised remnant of who we used to be—before loss, before transition, before the desertland of being unknown.

You are still capable. You are still lovable. You are still valuable. You’re just figuring out how to be all those things in a new context, without the geographical markers, relational buffers and defining anchors of your past.

It’s important to carve out some time and energy to remind yourself of those things that are significant to you, to reacquaint yourself with what thrills and fulfills you, to connect yourself again with the traits and passions that define you.

 

7. Find healthy ways of relieving the emotions.
There is nothing wrong with engaging in activities that distract us. In fact, there’s true resilience in those minutes and hours of “distance” from the grief. Do what you enjoy to inject a bit of light into the darkness of your losses: join an intramural team, cook, write, play video games, Skype with friends, go to the movies.

Just make sure these are temporary measures. It’s easy to escape into the coping mechanisms so deeply and often that we stop really participating in the life going on around us.

One more thing: move. Exercise releases chemicals in the brain that counteract the grip of sadness. I know it won’t be the first impulse, for some of us, to get up and go for a walk or head to the gym, but if you can force yourself to add some movement to your life, you’ll feel the benefits of it.

 

8. Look for reasons to be grateful.
Making of gratitude an intentional practice can be life-altering. And it can be as simple as jotting down three things we’re thankful for at the end of every day.

The hard stuff will always be at the tip of our brains—it’s just the way we’re wired—but the good stuff will take some focus to identify and acknowledge.

Choosing gratitude is not a magic bullet, but it’s a practice that pays off in a shifted perspective, determined optimism and emotional balance.

 

9. Persist.
There will be days when the effort of pushing forward through the grief will feel like too much, when it will seem easier to press that lid down over the emotions or to lock the door, crawl into bed and close your eyes on the “hard” that’s sapping your strength. There will be times when just making conversation will feel like too much effort.

Please believe me—it will get better. As someone who has survived the kind of loss, grief and pain that left me feeling crippled, I can assure you that healing is possible and real.

As you pay attention to what’s hard—as you give your grief the space and care it requires while still investing in the tomorrow you’re building—you’ll find a sort of balance returning. You’ll find the memories more sweet than bitter and the future more welcoming than frightening.

You’ll discover that though you lost a universe, you didn’t lose yourself, and the God who promised to walk with you, to love you through the changes and uphold you through the challenges, is still working to bring beauty from the ashes of your past.

Grief is not a comfortable phase. It feels like the aching reminder of a “homeness” and wholeness we fear we’ll never know again. And it is more than a dark ravine we just need to get over. There is richness and growth in acknowledging and understanding it—the opportunity to learn who we are and who God is as we explore its source and find healing.

Originally published here.

The Top 10 Most Valuable Mindsets for MKs and TCKs

I’ve written extensively in the past few years about attitudes and choices that can help MKs and TCKs to avoid some of the pitfalls inherent to being multi-cultural. Here are, in my estimation, the top ten most valuable of them.

1. I will believe that I am not weird—I am complex. 

It’s a refrain I’ve heard from young and old in my work with Third Culture Kids and the problem is mostly semantic. Saying “I’m weird” implies a sort of terminal condition. No one will ever understand me. “Complex” hints that with time and awareness, others will begin to figure us out. Has a global upbringing made us a bit more complicated than others? Absolutely. But it’s not an insurmountable thing for those who love us enough to seek to understand us. This video might be a great place to start!

2. I will recognize that I am not special—I am blessed.

Calling ourselves “special” implies superiority, yet those aspects of our lives that have shaped us are usually not something we’ve earned or chosen. We are MKs because our parents made the decision to go overseas as missionaries. That makes us fortunate—blessed—not better than others. “Special” often yields arrogance. “Blessed” is more likely to yield a humbled gratitude. The latter is so much more attractive and inclusive. For more, read here.

3. I will allow myself to fail publicly and privately.

One of the greatest challenges MKs experience is the pressure to live up to the expectations of people for whom “Missionary Kid” implies a deeper faith, better behavior, wiser choices and flawless living. If we let those standards guide us in even a subconscious way, we set ourselves up for a lifetime of disappointing others and ourselves. Accepting the fact that we’ll fail and admitting to it when we do is good and healthy—even if it’s disenchanting to others. For more, read here.

4. I will stay connected in some way to my other cultures.

When juggling so many cultural influences, it sometimes seems easier to simplify our lives by distancing ourselves from some of those places we call home in order to just exist in one location. It is an understandable and natural inclination! The problem is that much of the richness of our multi-culturality comes from being able to draw on the entirety of our life-experiences. It’s precisely because we juggle so many cultures that we have so much to offer—a broader worldview, global understanding, adaptability, etc. It would be tragic to lose the depth and wealth of our complex background has given us for the sake of a more “simple” identity. Staying connected in some small way to past worlds (whether through people or media or traditions or all of those) allows us to retain the treasures they’ve instilled in us. For more, read here.

5. I will apply the same curiosity, exploration and acceptance to my passport culture that I apply to foreign cultures.

As MKs, one of our greatest strengths is being able to insert ourselves into new cultures with inquisitiveness, grace and tolerance. Those skills seem to fly out the window when we reenter our own passport culture! If stranded in a remote tribal village, we’d enter the fray with some of our most prized traits on display: open-mindedness, a sense of adventure and cultural acceptance. But returning “home”? Not a chance. Think of how different our re-entry experience would be if we applied the same attitude to our passport culture as we do to foreign places. For more, read here.

6. I will be versatile in my relationship-building methods. 

As MKs, we build friendships in an uncommon way. We’re often quick and intense as we enter into relationships, aware that time is limited and comfortable sharing rapidly on an intimate level because of that. Mono-culturals tend to approach friendships differently, letting the “deepening” take a slower, more casual route. It may take longer and initially seem shallow, but there’s a good chance we’ll achieve meaningful relationship with our less global peers if we’re patient enough to allow for a slower pace. Dismissing people early because they don’t dive deep fast enough can eliminate the chance of true friendship. Understanding how our relationship model differs from that of mono-culturals is a good place to start. For more, read here.

7. I will use my experiences to enrich and not diminish others.

It’s a nasty little habit we have—nothing entertains MKs more than celebrating the “stupidity” of those less fortunate than us. Our backyards are the stuff of fantasies to most mono-cultural peers. We’ve seen more and experienced more than they can even imagine. Yet rather than being grateful for our blessings, we sometimes use our global savvy to make fun of the less fortunate. We’re in a unique position to bring the worlds we’ve known to those who will never get to witness them for themselves, yet we too often opt for something that looks an awful lot like arrogance instead. Let’s commit to kindly and humbly expanding the horizons of our mono-cultural friends (at an appropriate time in relationship with them) rather than mocking, humiliating or belittling them. For more, read here.

8. I will strive to distinguish between human failure and God’s character.

There’s no denying it. Many of us carry wounds from our years overseas. Some of us have been neglected, abused or afflicted by illness. We’ve seen death and famine. We’ve been harmed by the poor decisions of those who were supposed to care for us. It’s easy to blame God for the scars—as I did for many years. Yet so much of the violence and injustice we’ve suffered is the direct result of human mistakes and cruelty. God grieves over the actions and circumstances that harm us. Blaming Him will only deprive us of the powerful healing only His comfort can afford us. For more, read here.

9. I will choose to exercise gratitude, but won’t ignore the hardships.

The hardships are real. They influence our thinking and our outlook, our serenity and our faith. We must acknowledge and address them in order to heal from them. But as we’re in that process, balancing the pain with an intentional focus on what we have to be grateful for can be a perspective-enhancing practice. For more, read here.

10. I will acknowledge that being an MK alone won’t get me through life—having an intimate, trusting relationship with God will.

Sometimes, we get so caught up in our MK identity that we think it’s the only thing that defines us. It becomes the most meaningful and foundational aspect of our lives, and we can make the mistake of assuming it’s all we need…because we think it’s all we are.

But we’re so much more. We are children of God. And though our multi-cultural skills might be tremendous assets to be prized and celebrated, when life becomes treacherous and dark, they’ll be of little help. Only an active, intimate and dependent relationship with God will carry us through the trials that are inevitable and unskirtable as we live life in a broken world. His love and presence are inexpressibly precious. For more, read here.

You’ll notice that each of the ten mindsets above is stated as an intentional verb:  believe, recognize, allow, stay, apply, be, use, strive, choose, acknowledge. A shift in our way of thinking won’t happen organically. It will come as we invest determination and focus in making it happen, subjugating harmful habits to practices that might enhance our own lives and those of others.

To read more of my articles about MKs and parenting MKs, click here.

Taking the Hypocrisy Out of Home Ministry Assignment

Hypocrisy is a topic we don’t like to address in the missionary community—perhaps because of the unspoken reality that a little bit of deception has sometimes proven to be good for ministry. (I’m not condoning it, just acknowledging it.) But where does “putting your best foot forward” end and “misrepresenting yourself” begin?

The line is blurred in this world where personal relationships are often financial partnerships too.

If there’s one chapter of ministry that disguises the line even more, it’s HMA.

HMA (Home Ministry Assignment) is a necessary endeavor. It’s a chance for missionaries and their children to reconnect with their passport culture, to visit family and friends they haven’t seen in a while and to check in with churches and individuals who support their work.

Unfortunately, without careful management and execution, HMA can also teach observant children some unintentional lessons about relative honesty and incomplete disclosure.

We MKs learn the tricks of the trade by watching our parents.

We see them responding with a polite smile to people making comments they fiercely disagree with. We see them being more friendly with potential donors than they’d be with the grocer or a relative. We see them saying eloquent prayers in public that they’d never utter at home. We see them laughing with too much vigor or accepting offense with too much willingness—all in what we assume is an attempt to keep everyone happy…and generous.

Note: I don’t think most people set out to misrepresent who they are or what they think. It’s just one of the ways we can go off-track if we let the approval of others or fundraising mandates become the driving force of our HMA efforts.

Many MKs develop a flawed Philosophy of Furlough at an early age:

  • If supporters like us, they’ll support us.
  • If they don’t like us, they’ll stop supporting us.
  • If they stop supporting us, we’ll have to leave the field and Life-As-We-Know-It will come to an end.

Because a common MK trait is taking on the burdens of our world, we assume that the survival of Life-As-We-Know-It depends in great part on us.

So we enter into the HMA experience feeling the pressure to influence the outcome, even if that means being something other than our true selves. We try our hardest to be cute, winsome, talented, polite and well-behaved. We’ll eat the mushrooms we hate so as not to offend our hosts. We’ll recite John 3:16 in four languages any time we’re asked. We’ll do it all because we’re pretty sure we’re the persuasive props brought along for that purpose.

We live out the cynical premise that performance plus schmoozing equals getting to return home at the end of HMA.

Living in that distorted truth can be debilitating.

When I was sixteen, I sat in a service with my parents after a pre-church morning that had bristled with marital tension. I listened to my dad giving a heartfelt sermon while my mom still fumed in the pew beside me. I braced myself to sing the song that, in my mind, was supposed to “seal the deal” and ensure continued support. The responsibility was an anvil in my stomach as I got up to sing “There is a Savior” with sweet, practiced conviction. A couple ladies pulled out their Kleenexes as I finished and I felt a thrill of victory. My parents got up to make a final statement, standing close and smiling. The church applauded. Successful performance. Life-As-I-Knew-It had been preserved.

So wrong. So un-Christlike.

This mode of influence can be easily normalized in any field where image yields profit. In ministry, however, it takes on spiritual overtones…as if God Himself required it of us. When hypocrisy is attributed to God’s expectations for the sake of his work, it becomes even more sinister and destructive.

Marriage trouble? Don’t ever mention it. Missionary discord? Never refer to it. Ministry discouragement and attrition? Not something we discuss. Problems with lust, money-mismanagement, unethical behaviors? Nobody needs to know. Why? Because even we have bought into the myth that ministry requires that we present a certain image in order to fund our work.

The repercussions of this perspective on honesty and truth can be far-reaching.

If MKs have spent their childhood observing relationships in which approval (and its payoff) is obtained through something that looks like insincerity—or at the very least, careful image management—should we not be concerned about the honesty they’ll bring to the rest of their relationships? How will they find the courage and confidence to risk showing their flaws? And who will they lose to their inability to do so?

In my work with Missionaries’ Kids, I’ve encountered far too many who return to their passport culture to live long-term, believing that relationships will only be achieved through the same kind of selective self-revelation they saw in their parents on HMA. It’s a subconscious tendency that can lead to relational failure.

Early exposure to hypocrisy can affect our ability to be real with ourselves too.

We so keenly feel the pressure to live up to the expectations of others that some of us resort to hiding behind strategically crafted masks, berating ourselves when we let them slip.

We become fierce in our fakeness. Fearful too. And the habit can get so ingrained that we’re not even aware we’re living according to a destructive mandate to be something other than ourselves. It can prevent us from seeking help, maturing and finding an identity born of integrity.

At its worst, our hypocrisy—even just perceived hypocrisy—can eventually cause MKs to dismiss God, Christians and faith itself.

When the God of Truth is represented by envoys who rely on untruth to “get the job done,” it can cause a destabilizing disconnect that skews one’s outlook on all spiritual things. I’ve seen it happen. It is heart-wrenchingly tragic when it does.

How can we begin to reverse this trend? I’ll offer a handful of suggestions below, but please contribute yours too in the comments space beneath this post.

Change must begin with parents—they’re the ones who demonstrate authenticity and set the tone for HMA.

In everyday life:

  • Be real and vulnerable with people you can trust…especially in public. (Dare to defy the unspoken “be perfect or pretend” missionary motto.)
  • Demonstrate how honesty and vulnerability are healthy, especially when they lead to help, healing, and wholeness.
  • Set God’s expectations and grace as a standard, not a church’s or supporter’s approval.

During HMA:

  • Make sure your MKs know that you’re the adult, you’re the public persona, you’re the one shouldering the burden, the effort and the outcome.
  • Relieve your children of any responsibility for the results of your fundraising.
  • Tell your children what your financial situation really is, in terms they understand, so they don’t live in fear of immediate bankruptcy.
  • Validate your kids’ talents, but don’t use them as mere strategies and fundraising tools.
  • Give them the option not to participate in your HMA meetings or attend youth classes. They need to know that they have some degree of control over their part of your furlough. (You may need to clearly express this to supporters and church leaders too, if they pressure your children to be more involved than they want to be.)
  • Make sure your MKs know that you don’t expect them to change in order to be liked by potential donors. The same behavioral rules that apply behind closed doors apply on HMA.
  • Demonstrate Who and what really motivates your exchanges with the people you interact with—God and relationship, not dollar signs.

I’d be remiss not to mention the role of The church in addressing this issue.

Missionaries who have dared to be real in public settings have sometimes been met with judgment and disapproval by people who think they should be paragons of strength, resilience, virtue and unblemished character. Expressing concerns about team discord or personal challenges on the field has too often been interpreted as being unsuited for ministry rather than prompting a collaborative pursuit of solutions and healing.

In order for missionaries to be real, churches need to allow them to be fully human. The following is an incomplete list of suggestions. Again—please add yours in the comments at the end of this post.

  • Give missionaries permission to experience struggles. (You’re supporting real people who are just as susceptible to sin and weakness as anyone else.)
  • Out of relationship, ask personal questions with loving intentions.
  • Offer a safe place in which they can voice their failures and find compassionate help.
  • When they visit you with their MKs, demand nothing from the children except that they be children accompanying Mom and Dad. Let the family decide how much they’ll be involved.

I can’t end without saying that I’ve seen countless missionary families who have lived authentically on HMA! I’d go so far as to say that a majority of them do, sometimes at the cost of being misunderstood. It takes courage to be real in the face of unreasonable expectations. Let’s affirm and support each other toward that goal for the sake of the children who are watching and learning.

6 Permissions Most Missionaries’ Kids Need

As I travel to speak and consult with missionary families around the world, the word “permission” regularly comes up. In a subculture saturated with expectations and obligations, it seems to have a restorative power.

Missionaries’ Kids, too, live under burdensome expectations and would benefit as much as their parents from clearly articulated permissions. I believe the following are crucial to raising a generation of MKs unhobbled by the unreasonable demands of a world that may not fully understand what it is to be young and vulnerable, living cross-culturally in the fishbowl of ministry.

 

1. Permission To Be Kids

It’s no secret that missionaries’ children, much like pastors’ kids, feel held to higher standards than their peers. With friends and strangers watching their every move, there is unrelenting pressure to behave well. Be good. Be polite. Be friendly. Have a positive attitude and never—ever—complain.

The broad expectation that they be better behaved, smarter, and more mature than other children their age—or at least that they convincingly project these traits—can become a debilitating pressure.

And if there’s one thing MKs do well, it’s try to live up to unrealistic expectations.

When I was visiting with a missionary family a few weeks ago, I asked an 11-year old boy why his family had moved to Romania. He told me that he was there to “introduce people to Jesus.” Perhaps the most meaningful words I heard on that three-week trip were his mother’s when she said, “No, honey, mom and dad are here to introduce people to Jesus. Your job is to be a kid.”

What a simply-worded, freedom-giving statement! Her son, a relatively new MK, heard from his mother’s mouth that it’s okay for him to just.be.young. So he can talk back or stomp his foot or hate zucchini or complain or lie and expect consequences—but without the disproportionate shame too often levied on MKs who are just being kids in the world of ministry.

 

2. Permission To Fail

Children will fail. They’ll do stupid things, they’ll forget instructions, and they’ll disobey rules. It goes without saying that MK or non-MK, they need to know that mistakes and bad behavior are not unforgivable flaws.

In the ministry world, though, failure can take on more ominous overtones.

  • “We need to set an example for the unbelievers watching us.”
  • “God wants us to be a light in the darkness.”
  • “You represent God in your middle school.”

The exhortations seem benign, but they add a deeper condemnation to inevitable stumbles.

Demanding unreasonable exceptionality of MKs because their family represents God sets them up for the worst kind of failure: one in which their imperfection hurts their family’s work and tarnishes God’s image.

So it isn’t just a bad grade. It isn’t just getting cut from the soccer team. It isn’t just posting something inappropriate on Facebook. It isn’t just stealing change off the teacher’s desk or telling a lie about a friend.

It brings shame on themselves, on their families, and on God.

If we’re not careful with our words, we heap a spiritual burden on six-year-olds whose lives are already complicated by cross-cultural living, frequent transitions, and successive losses. The liberating balm of “permission to fail” for young people who are often overly self-blaming cannot be overstated.

 

3. Permission To Grieve

The heaviest burden many MKs bear is the number of goodbyes they have to say in their early years. The mission field is a transient place where someone is always leaving. The repeated departures create an expectation of loss that colors both their entry into new relationships and the nature of the friendships they form.

The world’s unspoken expectation of courage and resilience in the face of so much loss puts pressure on grieving MKs to get over it fast, to find comfort in an unflagging faith, and to forge ahead without handicap. Little emphasis is put on the grieving process, and little space is given to allow it to evolve.

Adding to the issue is the unwillingness of many adults in ministry to model healthy grieving for the younger generation. If MKs don’t see the grown-ups around them honestly demonstrating the journey from loss to healing, they won’t know that they’re allowed to walk it too.

Until missionary parents and the missionary community as a whole give permission to missionaries’ children to express and work through their grief—as ugly as it may get—we will continue to see hearts hardened toward God (on whom many blame their losses) and adult MKs still crippled by their losses in later seasons of their lives.

 

4. Permission To Dissent

MKs know they’re a package deal. God called their parents. He funded their ministry. They made it overseas and are doing good work. How dare they question a Calling? How dare they resist another move or resent another change of schools?

Of all the MKs I’ve worked with in more than twenty years, those who have felt no permission to voice a disagreement or question their parents’ choices are the ones whose resentment has been most bitter.

How easy it is for adults with a clear vision and driving passion to carve a path toward the Calling they perceive.

And how destructive it can be when the children in their care don’t feel the same impulse, but measure the Call in toxic increments of change.

Before announcing a new direction or an imminent uprooting, parents of MKs might consider gently introducing the topic—then entering into ongoing conversation and collective seeking. With compassion and attention. With hearts trained on their children while their spirits are tuned to God.

With permission to dissent—to express opinions that are contrary to their parents’—children will feel freedom to voice honest feelings, allowing the family to proceed perhaps more slowly, but with each member engaged in discerning what God is asking of them. The MKs will feel seen and known, and communication and empathy between family members will deepen.

 

5. Permission To Doubt

Not all MKs are saved. Not all MKs believe that God is real. Not all MKs view their parents’ faith in a positive light.

I didn’t encounter Jesus—truly encounter Jesus—until I’d been a missionary for a couple of years. Yet presumptions about the faith of MKs abound both in their sending churches and among their family members.

Of course she’s saved. Of course he’s on fire for God! They’re MKs!

So the young person whose life is steeped in Christianity feels guilty for doubting. Guilty for the shreds of unbelief that daren’t be expressed lest they bring shame (that word again) on the family and their work.

I’ve seen MKs trying to process their lack of faith being tisk’ed into silence. Or voicing their doubts and being preached into submission. Or hinting at uncertainty and being reproached into repentance.

Faith is not an inherited conviction. God is not a transferable commodity. Yet the pressure on MKs to not only believe, but be exemplary in their faith is rampant. What unfair pressure on souls whose perception of God has been complicated by a ministry-saturated worldview.

Permission to doubt is more than mere processing-space. It’s the gift of honest grappling toward eternal outcomes.

Parents need to extend it. Ministry communities need to extend it. Churches need to extend it. Adults and peers need to celebrate it as part of God’s working in the MK’s life.

Permission to doubt is crucial to an authentic faith.

 

6. Permission To Redefine Significance

The message comes from within and without the missionary community: “The best, most significant, and God-pleasing life you can live is one devoted to his service.”

But it’s a lie.

The best, most significant, and God-pleasing life is one in which relationship with him is central. Not work for him or sacrifice to him. Relationship with him.

In the missionary world, we too narrowly define significance as working for God. Well-intentioned believers reemphasize the message: “Your parents are doing the most important work.” Churches further accentuate it by highlighting missionary families and rewarding their effort with attention, prestige, and donations.

So the MK who wants to become a dancer feels like a sell-out. She’s seen the need, after all, and all she wants to do is dance? Shameful. All he wants to be is an electrician? Sad. All she sees herself doing is teaching? So unworthy of the MK-upbringing that shaped her—unless she teaches overseas.

I’ve known guilt-ridden adult MKs who can’t reconcile the career they love with the definition of significance that distorts their perspective—successful businessmen providing for the dozens of families they employ who feel they’ve missed the boat. Artists revealing God’s creativity and beauty to a cynical world who feel disloyal to the Call that galvanized their parents. Stay-at-home dads modeling God’s heart to their children who fear their lives are not significant enough.

Significance is not what we do. It’s who we are because of our relationship with Christ.

It’s the light we shine by our mere presence wherever we toil—not the task we do there. It’s the expression of God’s spirit in us that requires no words. It’s a dancer’s sublimation of the horrors of this world. The craftsman’s honesty and the excellence of his work. The teacher’s heart as she nourishes young souls.

There is deep significance in choosing to exercise the talents God has given us and in radiating him in the process. Too often, permission to find one’s intimate significance, then pursue and excel at it is poorly stated or withheld by well-intentioned missionary parents.

 

The Gift of Permission

Because so many of the expectations delineated above are unspoken, their antidote will have to be clearly articulated and frequently repeated. My encouragement to missionary parents desiring to remove the pressure from their still-developing children is fourfold. From their earliest age onward:

  • Foster open communication with your kids.
  • Use simple, unambiguous words to free them from unreasonable expectations.
  • Embody grace and mercy.
  • Model in your adulthood what you preach into their childhood.

Dare to open conversations that may take years to finish. It’s a healthy place to start for both the missionary and the MK.