Tag: grief

Sobs of Joy: Surrendering the Grief of Singleness on the Field

by Emma Bell

A few years ago, I flew back to the U.S. from my home in Thailand to be a bridesmaid in my dear friend’s wedding. It’s a common missionary experience. Occasionally, if the moment is dear enough to us that we just can’t miss it, we might fork up the money to fly back for such an important event. 

As soon as I landed in the U.S., delirious with jet lag, I was swept up into the flurry of the wedding: getting nails done, preparing the bachelorette party, sleeping on an air mattress, squeezing in a trip to Chipotle. After just a few days of craziness, I found myself all dressed up, standing to the right of the altar with the other bridesmaids and watching one of my best friends walk down the aisle towards her almost-husband. 

At some point during the ceremony, we all sang the song “You’re Beautiful” by Phil Wickham. I was already failing to hold back the tears, but they really started to stream on the last verse:

When we arrive at eternity’s shore
Where death is just a memory and tears are no more
We’ll enter in as the wedding bells ring
Your bride will come together and we’ll sing
You’re beautiful

I wanted to think that I’m just a sentimental person, that weddings are so beautiful and I’m just so tender, so that’s why I couldn’t keep my composure. But now, a few years later, I’m trying to be honest with myself: that moment was not only beautiful to me; it was also deeply painful. 

I resent that singleness could make me feel pain. It feels embarrassing to care. It feels anti-feminist. It feels weak. I have spent years learning the gifts and the beauty of singleness and have preached it from the rooftops. I shout to anyone who will hear me, “Singleness is a valuable gift! Jesus was single! Paul recommends it! Marriage isn’t superior to singleness!” And I still stand by these things. At the same time, in my own experience, singleness has caused me deep grief.

I’ve been seriously processing my singleness since I was about twenty-four. At that age, it truly felt like everyone around me was getting married. I had two roommates who were planning their weddings, and that same year I was discerning whether or not overseas missions would be my long-term career. I imagined going overseas and being the only single woman in a missionary community of marrieds and their kids. I pictured the isolation on Christmas when others would celebrate with their families, and I would be alone. I pictured the humility of it — being regarded as less mature or less of a leader because of my single status. 

[Praise God, most of these concerns have not been realized in the way that I had feared. God has given me wonderful friends—of both the single and married variety.]

It was age twenty-nine that singleness struck a new chord with me. I was twenty-nine when COVID upended my life. I found myself stuck in America, my home and possessions left behind in a country I had no idea if I’d ever get back to. Perhaps more importantly, I found myself living far away from my overseas team. I experienced, quite dramatically and suddenly, what I knew would come for me sooner or later: having to say goodbye to my teammates and closest friends — alone. 

Because friends don’t come with a “till death do us part” promise, I parted ways with the friends I had come to depend on like family. I’ll always remember when I chose to relocate to Thailand in 2021, and my favorite married couple decided to stay in America and work on getting pregnant instead. They told me they would be exiting this next chapter of my life over a Zoom call. We stayed on the call and cried, hardly saying a word, for probably an hour.

About a month later, I packed my bags and joined a new team in a new country. The missionary life is full of goodbyes — goodbyes on goodbyes on goodbyes. But for single missionaries, it is uniquely difficult because we do it alone.

I saw a statistic once that said of all the single missionaries on the field, women make up 80%. This means a couple of things for us single ladies. First, it’s hard to meet someone out here. The odds are not in our favor. Second, I am mercifully not alone in my singleness. In fact, I feel more seen and understood where I live overseas by other single missionaries and single Thai sisters than I do back in my church community in the U.S. where it feels like everyone was married by twenty-three.

Are we missionaries because we are single? Do singles have more freedom to go to the nations than those who marry? That’s at least partly true. I can think of a few people who had dreamed of being overseas before they married someone who did not share that calling. So, are we missionaries because we are single? Or are we single because we are missionaries? Would I have met someone and been married with kids by now if I had lived in the U.S. for the last twelve years instead of Asia? Maybe. Not necessarily. I know plenty of single people who live in their home country. 

Yet I find myself in a situation where my obedience to share Christ in an unreached part of the world appears to be at odds with my desire for marriage. I could “try” to meet someone, but again, there aren’t many options where I live. I could get online, but then I’d likely be meeting men who live somewhere else, so I’d have to be willing to at least consider leaving the field. Is my ministry calling more important, or is marriage? If a simple answer popped into your head, I doubt you’ve walked a mile in the single missionary’s shoes.

Singleness is a strange grief. It’s a grief that increases with time. I process it. I mourn it. I put it away for a time, only to take it out again and realize it’s grown bigger and changed shape. 

I’m thirty-four now. Some days, singleness hurts. It’s not having anyone to bicker with. It’s the social smallness you feel in comparison to a couple. It’s a lack of physical affection. It’s having to build trust from the ground up all over again with another new roommate. It’s when your age is getting older and your life stage is the same as a recent college-grad. It’s the feeling of rejection compounded over many years. It’s when the conversation turns to pregnancy or kids, and I have nothing to contribute. It’s when baby showers have a new twinge of sadness and shame. 

One night, lying in bed trying to fall asleep, my overactive mind stumbled upon a thought: What if God really loves me? A few days earlier someone had been praying for me, and as she prayed, she said this to me: “He loves you so much, Emma. He would do anything for you — just ask Him.” Those words stunned me. They felt so personal and specific to me. Days later, they were still ringing in my ears. Is she allowed to say that? How could she even know that that’s how God feels about me? 

Yet I couldn’t deny that it had to be true. God’s Word says so over and over. Jesus said to his disciples, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). And a few verses later: “Whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you” (John 15:16.) Romans 8:32 says, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” 

The idea that Jesus deeply loves me and takes care of me wasn’t brand new information, but that night, the Spirit allowed me to believe it in a way I hadn’t dared to before. I sat up in my bed and started to cry. I started to really cry. Sobs. I had to get a box of tissues. Sobs of relief. Sobs of joy. Sobs where my walls of self-protection were being dismantled. Sobs I thought I might have if a man ever told me, “I love you, and I choose you.” 

And ever since then, I’ve consistently found it much easier to believe God really loves me. His love is not theoretical. It’s not just for theologians to muse upon. He is near to us. He heals our wounds.

When we arrive on eternity’s shore
When death is just a memory and tears are no more
We’ll enter in as the wedding bells ring
Your bride will come together and we’ll sing
You’re beautiful

I may never ever have a wedding day. I may have to continue dealing with my ever-expanding, ever-changing grief for the rest of my life here. But I will be at that wedding — the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev. 19:9). Because of Jesus, I’m invited to be in that marriage. The marriage of which all marriages are but a dim shadow — the eternal union of Jesus and His bride, His people. 

At that wedding, rejection and shame will fall off my shoulders as I am welcomed by the King himself. To be included and chosen on that day will far outshine any loneliness I’ve ever felt. And I know that on that day, when I finally see Him with my own eyes and worship Him alongside people from every tribe, nation, and tongue, no part of me will regret trusting God with my singleness. Not one part of me will regret putting my whole life into His hands. When I hear Him welcome me home, I won’t have any more questions.

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Emma Bell has loved doing evangelism and discipleship with the unreached for ten years now — first in East Asia and now in Thailand. If you’d like to respond to this article, Emma would love to hear from you. You can contact Elizabeth Trotter, and she’ll connect you.

You Were Never Meant to Break Alone

Content warning: This article contains descriptions of a tragic death.

If you’ve ever suffered alone, you know how unbearable it is. Suffering is bad. Alone-ness is worse. This is what Lent is showing me—that this liturgical practice of communal reflection, grief, and hope is a formative Christian discipline about togetherness. It’s teaching us how to hold together in the weight of human brokenness. It’s teaching us not to protect ourselves from grief or rush past it, but to sit with it, be changed by it, and move forward together in it.

I don’t want to be spared from sadness. I want to learn what to do with it, how to be changed by it, and how to live fully with others in the midst of it. I was eight years old when I first learned this.

“Something is wrong with Richard.” The name of my best friend in Cameroon fell heavy as my neighbor delivered grim news—the kind that is worse at night. Richard’s flu had taken a turn for the worse when his family sought a traditional healer, whose methods of cutting out the swollen uvula spiraled into disaster.

My dad, having the only vehicle in our village at the time, loaded the young teen into our family car/community ambulance and began the starry-night journey across wretched clay roads to a mission hospital two hours away. 

As the sun broke through the night the next morning, I woke to wailing. My dad drove up our driveway and delivered my friend’s body to his horrified mother. I later found out that my father had to watch as Richard’s eyes grew wider and his lungs filled with his own blood, mission doctors and nurses desperately trying to provide relief that never came.  

I remember falling silent and shaking on my front steps, overwhelmed by the sight of my village mamas who came running, screaming, tearing their clothes, fainting. The air filled full and loud, their wailing alerting the rest of the village that we’d lost our own. These women made grief a force that was fierce, collective, and fully alive. I was overcome. But I was not alone. 

Then the rituals began. They are customs too sacred and culturally protected to write for the world to see, but they are ones that honor the pain of the living while honoring the life of the dead. Ones where the body of a child is passed around, and the women who once nurtured life into this being now metaphorically drink of the death that the body experienced. That day my village mamas gathered around a broken body and remembered—together. 

This felt viscerally like communion. 

Was I afraid? Yes. Did I crawl into my parent’s room the following nights scared that my own lungs might choke the life out of me in my sleep? Yes. Was the sight of my friend’s body being passed around in sacred ritual overwhelming? Yes. 

But I didn’t need saving from the sadness. I needed to be taught what to do with it. I needed to see with my own two eyes that crying your lungs out with your neighbors is exactly what you do when life is lost. I needed to learn that shared shrieks of crushed hearts mean you’re not alone. I needed to see that falling to the ground and losing consciousness from grief is what mothers do when they put to rest the bodies that sprouted inside them—and that they have people who will do it with them. 

We were breaking. But we were breaking together.

My Cameroonian mamas taught me to acknowledge sadness for the violence that it is on the soul instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. They taught me to hold the paradox that grief feels so constricting because life was first good, because we first loved, and now we have lost. My parents taught me that crawling into their room for comfort instead of panicking alone is exactly what I should do when I’m afraid.

Years later, I went to my first Western funeral. The stoic suits and stifled tears felt almost hollow. The room felt uncomfortably polite, and this form of grieving seemed to tell only a partial story as everyone sat perfectly spaced in their individual chairs. That is, until I saw my normally put-together friend drag herself to her son’s casket and lay herself fully across it, refusing to rush mourning for the sake of the ceremony. And the whole room broke. 

It was then that I knew grief is universal. No matter the ritual, we need togetherness when anguish hits.

No one is truly protected from the shattering moments of life. But straddling worlds may mean there’s a little less insulation between you and death, poverty, war, injustice, bad medicine, and crime. Becoming one with our neighbors and bearing their burdens as our own makes these truths worthy of our attention, our energy, our love, and our sadness. And this sadness isn’t valueless. 

As we sit together around the world in the reflection of Lent, may we heave a collective Christian sigh. One where we commune to honor the hanging of Heaven’s Child while also hungrily accepting His atonement. One where we refuse to rush through the observance so we can start life’s ceremonies. One where we are not protected from brokenness but are changed by it. And one where we break—but never alone.

Photo by Marianna Smiley on Unsplash

As an Adult TCK, I Was Resistant to Grief Processing. Here’s What Changed My Mind.

I first learned about the Grief Tower model while taking a course on providing care for Third Culture Kids. Some things weren’t new to me. I’m a TCK. I’m married to a TCK. And I raised two TCKs. But some stuff was. 

In the course we learned that global childhoods are ampersand in nature and that we can honor both the good and the hard things that shape our backgrounds. We learned that global kids are twice as likely as monocultural kids to experience harmful risk factors—but that their international upbringing is also full of deliciously unique potential.

We heard how much expat parents love their kids—but also how goodbyes, starting over, losing people, exposure to trauma, and relationship disruptions can stack up during childhood until the body finally says, “This is enough,” and our health topples over, often when we least expect it. 

These things made sense to me. For other TCKs at least. I could picture the faces of kids I knew who had experienced Big T traumas, and I began to understand why that first or second year of college was disastrous for so many, as they suddenly developed risky behaviors and health problems. They must have been going through a lot, and it all caught up.

Part of me wanted to interrupt the instructor with my perspective as a TCK and let all the eager participants know that most of us still love TCK life. But I held my tongue, literally between my teeth. Even when I disagree with someone or don’t like what I’m hearing, I believe in keeping an open mind. 

So I tried to think of these new thoughts, the ones I was resisting, on a personal level. I thought back to my first year of college and remembered the unexpected turn my life took. If my parents hadn’t planned a home assignment for that same year, I don’t know where I would be today. My thoughts about “those” TCKs suddenly turned personal. I’d had some hard things stack up too. But in my fierce love for growing up global, I had brushed them off.

Our class was instructed to make a timeline of some of the harder life experiences that stood out to us. A disquieting malaise settled over me. Were we ever going to get to the good stuff? The adventures of my childhood in Cameroon felt strangely compromised by this exercise. I needed people to know that global childhood is wildly beautiful.

At the same time, I knew these instructors were experts in TCKs, and my single experience didn’t tell the whole TCK story. They were coming at it from a research background, while mine was totally anecdotal. But this exercise still didn’t feel very ampersand-y. It felt more like a betrayal to my entire life. So, do I say something? 

I decided to wait and see if we would get a chance to write about our positive experiences too. My pen was ready to wordify the memories flooding my mind—

My whipping ponytail flying down dirt roads with five friends piled high on my bike. Stirring corn flour into fufu over eucalyptus embers. Joining the beat of goatskin drums and Cameroonian choirs to worship God in the way that became normal to me. Twisting horsehair into birdtraps and roasting our reward with my friends. Huddling around the radio to listen to the BBC chime of news every evening. My family of six devouring Mom’s pancakes made from precious flour and sugar from the capital city. Muddy soccer wars in torrential tropical rains with my high school friends. Learning from the actions of my international school teachers that Jesus doesn’t recoil from our ugly parts, He leans into them. 

These were a massive part of my childhood, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing down the bad stuff without also acknowledging the good. It wouldn’t fairly represent me or my experience. And it might just scare my classmates off from the good work of raising their own kids abroad. 

I was forming a model in my head for how the class could better balance the good with the hard. Then came the instruction: “When you’ve drawn your timeline of grief blocks, go ahead and write two emotions you felt under each block.”

I could no longer keep silent. I’d watched some TCKs get stuck there on an unforgiving path of retelling their hardship. So I formed my concern as a question: “Will we go back later and write down some of our childhood highlights? Those are really important to me.”

Her knowing smile told me she’d heard this before. Her look wasn’t patronizing. It was gentle.

“That makes sense. The good stuff is so important to honor. But the reason we focus on grief for this timeline is because the good stuff doesn’t weigh us down. Unprocessed grief does.”

If I’d been struck by lightning, the accuracy of her words couldn’t have cut any faster or truer to my heart.

The good stuff doesn’t weigh us down. 

It’s there. We honor it. We remember it. We celebrate it. But the good stuff is not what caused some of the TCKs I knew in college to suddenly engage in risky behaviors, try drugs for the first time, abuse alcohol, start having nightmares, develop hair loss, become hypervigilant, have health crashes, or harm themselves.

It was the hard stuff that caught up to us. We ignored it because we were so busy focusing on the good stuff. Or we thought we couldn’t do anything about it anyway. Or we had internalized messages that anger and sadness are bad. Or it felt like betrayal to our rich experiences to acknowledge anything remotely negative. Or we simply hadn’t learned how to hold two truths in tension—that life can be both good and hard. 

God was at work beneath my resistance, and the tectonic plates of some un-nameable thing in my core began to shift. I realized that I had learned the ampersand truth in my faith. Wrestling with God through hard seasons, devastating seasons, I’d learned deep in my cells that He could hold all of me, not just the best of me. He could hold my questions, my anger, my unhealth, and my valleys, alongside my gratitude. 

But I’d not applied the same full care to my TCK story. On some level I had acknowledged the hard parts, but I hadn’t honored them with the space they deserved. For my spiritual life, grief and tension felt appropriate. For my global childhood, sitting a bit longer with the hard parts felt like a betrayal to the wonder that it was. 

I began to sink my teeth into deeper truths about the incredible gift of a global childhood, but this time of acknowledging and honoring some of the harder things about globally mobile life truly impacted me.

And I didn’t get stuck. I didn’t negatively or irreversibly polarize my experience. Quite the opposite. This exercise unlocked an even deeper appreciation for my full life—all of me and all that shaped me. 

I began to hold some of the beliefs I’d built up to the light and re-examine whether they were helping me, and whether I wanted to carry them into the next decades of my life. Beliefs like processing the hard parts diminishes the gift, anger is bad, and acknowledging hard stuff betrays someone or something.

My faith already had ampersand depth. Now I was being asked to apply that same depth to something I cherished as positively wonderful — my TCK story. God had already taught me the beauty of holding truths in tension. Now I was inviting Him to show me how to hold this full truth in tension. I was inviting Him to help me honor the goodbye to Cameroon that sucker punched me, the reverse culture shock that bewildered me, the cultural isolation that marked periods of my life. 

This exercise unlocked something else of equal or greater value. The ability to hold all of my family and all that shaped and is still shaping them. My husband. My daughter. My son. 

And this kind of ripple effect started to spread outward to other relationships.

I no longer feel compromised by making space for all of life—not only my own. As I work with expat families and their children, there’s a fuller and newer space for their entire story. We can synthesize the whole story—including the parts that haven’t taken up enough space—whether good or bad. We can talk about the joy of friends and the missing of parents at boarding school. We can talk about the thrill of travel and the hardship of living in a war zone. 

If their story is mostly great, we can acknowledge the hard parts they might have glossed over—the lonely birthday party after a big move or the long, empty nights of a parent disappearing into the overwhelm of their own mind. And if their story is mostly hard, we can honor it and still be curious about the hidden sweet moments that may have been overshadowed for years—their host country nanny picking them ripe mangoes or the tropical sun streaming through banana leaves on a steamy morning. Because either extreme of grief—ignoring it or getting swallowed whole by it—isn’t helpful. 

And now I understand better why some TCKs get stuck. They don’t get stuck because they’ve dared to examine the hard things—they get stuck because they’ve never had enough space to process them. Maybe they’d been rushed past their hardship too many times, told to focus on the adventure, the privilege, the good. Or maybe they weren’t told anything, and the silence was thundering. They never got a chance to catch their breath from those hard stories in the safety of loving arms. As a global community we need to make space for the full TCK story, not just the instaperfect parts we’re comfortable celebrating.

I’m reminded here of God’s tender provision to make a shade plant grow quickly over Jonah as he sat exposed and vulnerable to the sun’s pounding heat, grumbling about God’s grace to Nineveh. Scripture tells us the plant was to ease the discomfort that Jonah faced as he listed his grievances (Jonah 4).

Even though Jonah had just been the recipient of immeasurable grace himself, God didn’t shut his frustration down. He provided shade and a receptive place for Jonah’s reflection. And when Jonah still couldn’t escape his negative mental loop, God allowed the sun to touch him again, sparking an honest and welcomed conversation. 

If God could hold space for Jonah’s fury without rushing him past it, then maybe I could learn to do the same. For myself. For the expat families I work with. For my own kids. I have a living picture of a God who didn’t say, “Get over it, Jonah. Focus on the good,” but made room for the mess. First He offered the comfort of shade, and then He initiated an honest conversation. He didn’t recoil. He stayed present to hold the whole story. It didn’t start with a lecture, but with shade.

In a way, all this grief processing brought me back to the same place I started. I have a more full appreciation of the hard and painful parts, and still I’d like to raise my hand to the whole global classroom and say, “And it was wildly beautiful. All of it. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

The Spiritual Discipline of Remembrance

by Lauren Wells

Remember when you were slaves in Egypt and I rescued you with my mighty hand…

Remember what happened long ago, for I am God, and there is no other…

Remember my body and blood that has been shed for you…

I sat with a young woman as she and I spent another hour together recalling the life events on her Grief Tower — the hard parts of her life that had stacked up over the past two decades. Her Grief Tower Timeline was filled with some of the most severe, heartbreaking traumas of anyone I had worked with. And like most missionaries (and missionary kids) I’ve worked with, as she recalled each trauma, she also quickly dismissed its severity with spiritual platitudes. 

But God used it… 

But I can see how it worked out for good… 

But God is good… 

It’s all part of His plan…

She was deeply afraid to admit and articulate the gravity of the things that had happened and the depth of grief and heartbreak she had experienced. It was as if a steel shield covered those wounds and any attempt to uncover and grieve them was deflected by pointing to a nice spiritual bandaid plastered over the top. 

This coping method isn’t unique to her – I see it all the time, especially in the missions world.

I wonder if it is instilled in us that the correct, spiritual answer is one that dismisses the hard and proclaims the good? 

In my teenage years as a missionary kid, I certainly remember the admiration I received for such faith-filled answers.

I wonder if deep down, we feel the need to protect God’s reputation, advocating for his goodness by diminishing hurt?

I certainly don’t want anyone to question God’s goodness because of my hard stories.

Yet as I read the stories of trauma, grief, and heartbreak in the Bible, I don’t see a God who says, “just ignore the hard that happened and focus on the fact that I used it.” 

I see a God who says, 

Remember how hard it was…

Remember how painful that was… 

Remember how desperate you were… 

Don’t forget the depths of despair, the intensity of the heartache, the gravity of the pain.

Because if you forget, you also don’t remember how big I am. 

 

Holy Remembrance of Hard Things

Over and over, God commands his people to remember how hard, dark, sad, and ugly things were. And then, to celebrate the incredible contrast of his love, goodness, and might that rescued them from adversity of all kinds.

The remembrance we’re called to isn’t a “focus on the positive” outlook that skims past the hard and onto the happy ending. 

In order to truly understand the depths from which we have been saved, we have to admit how deep those depths were. 

The praise for how the Lord has rescued us with his mighty hand is so much greater when we give weight to the agony from which we were rescued. 

The weight of the cross isn’t so significant if we downplay the suffering. 

I’m so grateful that the Bible gives us a framework for navigating these paradoxical truths.

Many of the psalms of David guide us through this process: 

Cry Out to God 

Why…?
I felt so…
Where were you when…?
How…?
Did you…?

Ask for What You Need 

Show me where you were
Comfort me
Help me forgive
Remind me of your goodness
Show me how you’ve used that

Cling to His Character 

I know you are… (good, kind, gentle, loving, caring, etc.)
I know you didn’t (leave me, forget me, etc)…
I trust that you…

This framework guides us through processing hardships in a way that doesn’t skip over the big emotions, questions, and outcries. Yet it also doesn’t leave us in that pit but holds equal space for us to remember who God is and how he’s proven himself faithful in the past.

As we unstack the tower of grief that has grown throughout our lives and help others to do the same, let us make room to see how big and good God is by not downplaying how hard and painful life can be. By confronting the depth of our wounds, we create space for the extraordinary grace and goodness of God to be fully experienced. 

If you want to learn more about how to unstack your “Grief Tower” from a Biblical perspective, check out the What Made That Feel So Hard?: Bible Study Guide that pairs with Lauren’s latest book What Made That Feel So Hard?: The Unstacking Method. Both are available on Amazon. 

Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash

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Lauren Wells is the founder and CEO of TCK Training and the Unstacking Company and author of Raising Up a Generation of Healthy Third Culture Kids, The Grief Tower, and Unstacking Your Grief Tower. She is an Adult TCK who spent her teenage years in Tanzania, East Africa. She sits on the board of the TCK Care Accreditation as Vice Chair and is part of the TCK Training research team focusing on preventive care research in the TCK population.

Co-Grieving Loss with Your Repatriated TCK

We didn’t have words for TCK loss back then. Not when I left Cameroon at nineteen and stepped onto U.S. soil as a stranger to my own country. But just because there weren’t words doesn’t mean the ache of loss didn’t burrow deep. Nineteen and newly repatriated felt like drowning in a sea of people who looked like me and talked like me but didn’t know the red-earth-Africa that shaped me. 

I hardly recognized the girl I became in the wake of losing Cameroon, my best friends, and everything that felt familiar. That season was one of the hardest – and one of the unhealthiest – of my life.

Now, after the years have fast forwarded to an empty nest, I find myself looking back, not just at my own story but at theirs. I think of my children, my third culture kids, who built rich and beautiful lives on South African soil, their home. How will they handle letting go? How will they carry the weight of leaving behind the people and places that shaped them?

When I saw Megan Norton’s invitation to write a letter to my recently repatriated TCKs for her upcoming book, Letters Now Sent, I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I know the grief of leaving a place that tattoos an indelible mark on your soul. As their mother and as a TCK myself, I want to co-grieve their losses of saying goodbye to a life they loved in South Africa. And I know where I want them to root themselves now, as they step into adulthood in the U.S.

This letter is a new beginning with new language for parents of TCKs. It is my way of opening the door to a safe and sacred conversation with my young adult children—one established in love, shared understanding, and the kind of hope that reroots through the cracks of even the hardest losses. While their reactions to my letter are deeply personal and honey to my heart, I can tell you that this budding conversation was met with warm reciprocity and open arms. 

A letter to Elaina and Sawyer Danforth, 2025 (republished at A Life Overseas with permission) 

My two dearest toasted marshmallows,

You are eighteen and nineteen now. University carries a steep learning curve for everyone, but especially for the ones like you who left home, country, and friends to be grafted back to the place of your heritage. 

As second-generation TCKs, you belong to a tribe that your father and I know well. Your childhood was formed in the womb of the cradle of humankind, in KwaZulu-Natal, and it ended abruptly on the other side of a plane ride to the United States. But the things that formed you there still sing in every crevice of your mind and shape the way you see the world. 

Repatriation is a season when the losses of the familiar sink in hard for TCKs. And these are the years when you become aware of your roots, the ones that have been transplanted to new soils and now feel wildly distinct and out of place. The places of your childhood are the places where your formative and deepest roots grow. And the soil of South Africa no longer surrounds or supports you. 

You’ll remember from working on our farm that a transplanted plant often wilts for a while. It is learning to survive in a new and unfamiliar environment. Its roots aren’t sure what to make of its new home. They don’t know whether they can unfurl and take new life or whether the newness will be hostile to growth. Repatriating TCKs are the same. 

While my roots in South Africa will never be as deeply formative as yours, I am here to co-grieve your losses with you. I did the same as a nineteen-year-old with my Cameroonian roots. And your father did too, at eighteen with his Congolese and Central African roots. 

Some losses are obvious. Our imperfectly perfect little farmhouse and the stability of its cracked walls. The foamy blueness of whales flirting between the horizon and the Indian Ocean. The oneness of our multicultural, multi-lingual farm family. The wind-whipped cheeks from four-wheeling wild past giraffes. The saggy eyes after Minecraft all-nighters with friends. The laughter with your non-blood sisters farmsteading in the mountains. The crispy-edged pancakes hot off the griddle every Saturday morning. The seasonal ebb and flow of subtropical downpours and droughts. 

But some losses are hidden. Some, you won’t even know you miss until you come across them years later. And you’ll be caught off guard by a sudden feeling of home. Hidden losses are the sounds, smells, and invisible things that God sprinkled into the backdrop of your childhood. They are the things that you didn’t even know weren’t everywhere on planet earth. Until they weren’t. 

Your hidden losses don’t have to make sense to anyone else. They don’t even have to be pleasant. But something about these background sounds and smells had a profound impact on developing the unseen part of who you are today. And we honor those gifts by naming them. 

The background sound of your childhood is the cry of hadedas filling pink southern skies and beckoning your sleepy eyes open. You didn’t even know the sound was missing until that first morning in a Midwest dormroom when the synthetic shock of an alarm clock demanded your attention. 

It is the faithful singsong Xhosa greeting “Molweni” on your proud farm stoep. It is the mourning doves telling each other off gently and sternly. It is the inexplicable peace of violent rains threatening to crash right through tôle roofs. It is the baying of hounds, whether to threaten skelems or to give chase to dassies, outside your burglar-barred window. 

It is the South African flavor in which people have always said your name. It is the twisted, segregated history healing in real time through the harmony of church songs in English, Afrikaans, and Zulu. It is the comfort of our family’s age-old call to meals that reaches back to the recesses of your first independently held spoon, “On va prier.”

The background smell embedded in the roots of your childhood is a eucalyptus flame licking Karoo lamb ribs on the braai. It is soft buttermilk vanilla steam from an Ouma rusk dunked in Five Roses tea. How can something be so moorishly crunchy and goopy at the same time? It is the barely-there salt in the air where the Indian Ocean laps at the sky. And yes, it is even the familiar sewage plant every time we try to hold our breath at that bend in the highway by Uvongo.

Your roots will fumble around in this new place of red, white, and blue for a while, figuring out what is friendly soil and what isn’t. And this is the time. Dit is tyd to close your eyes, take a breath, and rediscover the power of your one unshakable tap root. It is your deepest root. The most formative one. The most familiar one. The most stabilizing one. It is your one root that pushes far past all the others, past every good and rocky soil, reaching like life depends on it, to the source of life. Water. Living Water. 

It is in Living Water that you’ve always found life and truth and all that is good. When everything around is unfamiliar, this source is the familiar. 

You’ll find community in the taproots of familiar people planted there too. And you’ll come to know new people who are automatically family because their taproot seeks life in the same place where yours does. This is the good stuff, my toasted marshmallows. 

While your secondary roots stumble around and try to make sense of star-spangled life, sink all your energy, all your questions, all your everything into your taproot’s source of life. It is the one and only thing that will never change no matter where you go, how far you fall, or how unfamiliar everything else seems. 

Taprooted to the Source with you,

Mom (Anna Danforth)

~~~~~~~

Inspired by Ruth Van Reken‘s book Letters Never Sent, Letters Now Sent will be a collection of letters from TCKs, parents of TCKs, and system leaders to share personal stories about their experiences with TCKs, being a TCK themself, and/or raising TCKs. This book is a fusion of both memoir and anthology written in a specific “Dear [name]” format. 

Here is the Google Form link to submit a letter with additional details about length and content prompts: https://forms.gle/jQyzq3TtFqfyznvCA. The deadline to submit a letter is March 31, 2025, and the book will be launched in July 2025 at Ruth’s 80th birthday celebration. Families in Global Transition is hosting the 80th Birthday party in Chicago on July 26, 2027, and registration will be live on their website soon. You do not have to be a member of FIGT to register for this event.

25 Years After the End of the World

Who remembers Y2K – that epic turn-of-the-millennium moment when all of the world’s computers crashed, power grids failed, and we had to live off of the five-gallon buckets of beans and rice stored in our closets?

Wait. . . disaster didn’t strike quite as everyone feared that year, did it? 

The minor-scale disaster that I personally faced as a 16-year-old on New Year’s Eve 1999 when I accidentally drove away from the gas station with the nozzle still hanging out of my ‘51 Studebaker Bullet Nose sticks with me, though. Boy, was I embarrassed. 

The old bullet nose made a 4th of July parade appearance last summer.

Somehow I survived Y2K and learned a few lessons along the way, as well.

For one, fuel nozzles are made to detach from their hoses in cases of inexperienced driver neglect (not inebriated, I promise!). It was horrifying, but it wasn’t the end of the world.

Two, over-preparedness always has two sides to it. The dark side, of course, is the fear motive. When we hoard or hide or hurt others in a mindset of self-protection, we aren’t living out of the boundless, sacrificial love of Christ. The ugliest forms of this at a societal level cause racial divides and wide socio-economic gaps, but on a personal level this likely looks more like snapping at my children when they’re interrupting my time — my precious, never-have-enough-of-it time.

The brighter side of over-preparedness, however, is generosity. It’s the neighbor saying, “Hey, we bought a bit too much flour because it was on sale. Care for a bag?” Or it could be the family who safeguards their sabbath time by working together the day prior to cook and clean so they can rest well together. Over-preparedness might mean that you use your time diligently to prepare for that project ahead of time so you can be fully present to enjoy it when it comes to completion. Again, whatever the motive, over-preparedness isn’t the end of the world, either.

Third – and this is the piece that frames my mindset the most these days – is the understanding that life has seasons, cycles, and processes. Centuries and millennia roll over, ticking on into the next. The earth spins through days, months, and agricultural seasons. Day to night to day, spring to summer to fall to winter to spring (or rainy season to cool season to smoky season to blessed rain, if you’re in Southeast Asia like me), our world rolls on. I’ve come to understand this as not only part of the created order, but also part of the seasons of the human soul.

In the past few years, I’ve witnessed my family move through the grief cycle in various ways and speeds as we’ve welcomed a son through adoption. As any adoptive family will tell you, it’s both beautiful and messy, and the sacrifices and trauma of it all need to be processed and grieved. It wasn’t realistic to expect our family to be in an outgoing season of fruitful, productive ministry early on in the adoption transition. We needed to hunker down, prune back, and let ourselves grow new roots together. 

Now, two years post-adoption, we’re able to do and experience more as a family again. Our season has shifted. But had we not embraced a quieter winter-type season of dormancy and underground healing and growth initially, we likely wouldn’t be able to function productively now.

This idea of recognizing and embracing my season has transformed how I make decisions and, as a natural outcome of those decisions, how I live life. I find myself not only asking, “What will produce the best results?” but also, “Is this the right time for production, or do I need to store up and wait for a while?” 

It feels like there’s maturity and wisdom in that perspective, and I’m claiming it as I move through my 40s. Seasons of new growth are exciting, but seasons of quietly solidifying that growth are necessary. Likewise, seasons of pulling back, navigating change, and waiting are often painful, but guess what? They’re not the end of the world.

The end of the world is in fact coming, and these mortality-bound seasons will one day end, but not until death is swallowed up in life, and the Lion’s roar carries us home. Until then, our aim is to live out of tender-hearted love and courageous compassion, knowing that the world’s end is safely out of our control.

“Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.”

-C.S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

 

A Tale of Christmas Fails

Is it just me, or does it feel like someone ups the ante on Christmas festivities each year? Between social media baking tutorials and Pinterest photos of homes that could only have been decorated by an elite squad of elves, it seems that there is always a new ritual to add to the Christmas repertoire.

Whether it’s incorporating a new Advent book, attempting to bake exquisitely decorated confectionery with kids who only show up to eat cookie dough, or hosting a myriad of parties for different circles within the community, Christmastime expectations and the lofty standards of beauty and decorum therein can be exhausting. 

As a chronic party-thrower, I somehow developed an annual Christmas ritual of well-intentioned self-destruction. Stage One commences shortly after American Thanksgiving and is marked by such an abundance of delusional excitement for Christmas festivities that I invariably fill up our calendar with parties, dinners, and plans to host guests for several days at a time.

Things will be pretty cheery until Stage Two hits, which usually happens around December 18th. This is when the party fatigue sets in, so I start perusing last-minute getaways to fantasize about flying to the Maldives and staying until the year’s end. Stage Three hits when I realize that following through with the aforementioned fantasy is far too expensive and would require more energy than I even have left in the tank. 

Bleary-eyed, caffeinated, and fueled by Christmas cookies for breakfast, I’ll power through to the final stretch of festivities with an eye twitch and nightly indigestion. By the time Christmas is over, my whole family is exhausted but grateful to bask in the quieted beauty of wintertime in the Arabian desert. 

For years, I have hated myself for this annual cycle of Christmas fatigue. I could only truly contemplate the beauty of the long-awaited savior once the day had passed and the celebrations were over. My husband and I try to construct a holiday schedule that won’t leave us feeling like we are about to keel over and die, and each year we think that we’re about to do it right this time. Nevertheless, we find ourselves in the same condition year after year. 

As I entered the fourth and final stage of 2023’s Christmas failure ritual, aka the post-mortem pity party (guestlist of one), I re-shelved the Advent book I had purchased a month earlier with a doomed optimism. The words of “O Holy Night” played from my nearby speaker. 

Long lay the world in sin and error pining
‘Til he appeared and the soul felt its worth
A thrill of hope- the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!

Contemplating the weariness of my own soul and the thrill of hope I felt in having the busyness behind me, the words of that hymn invited me to contemplate the chaos into which Christ was born. There were perhaps salacious whispers and rumors surrounding Mary’s unwedded pregnancy, and possibly a humiliating sense of rejection in Joseph’s fruitless search to secure lodging in his own hometown. 

And then there were the Israelites, God’s chosen people, who had labored for millennia to fulfill the requirements of their covenant festivities and sacrifices—all in remembrance of God’s promise and their own anticipation of a Savior that God himself had promised to provide. Their wait was laborious and rife with rebellion and rejection of their holy covenant, yet God was faithful to uphold his promise of deliverance. 

For some of us, there is just no getting around how difficult and stressful the Christmas season will be. While this time of year may be lively and joyous for some, it pangs with grief and the pressure to perform for others. If Christmastime does not hold hopeful anticipation for you, perhaps you are feeling the reality of just how desperately the world was pining for rescue. In the midst of what is hailed as “the most wonderful time of the year,” the truth is that many cannot help but yearn for December 26th. 

The Messiah’s coming was packaged with many emotions, but not all were particularly joyful. Joseph was ready to call it off with Mary prior to angelic intervention, and Jesus’ arrival was followed by the anguished wails of Bethlehem’s bereaved mothers. Meanwhile, Joseph and Mary fled the country to escape the royal manhunt for their baby, and the Magi had to take the backroads home to avoid the murderous fallout of unwittingly disclosing to King Herod that a powerful new king was in town. Even for those who knew the Messiah’s arrival meant salvation, their circumstances at the time of Jesus’ birth were marked by fear, chaos, and death.

If you are one who is feeling the weight of overwhelm, failure, and grief at Christmastime, know that you are in good company. These may not be the marketable emotions of Christmas, but they are certainly the reality of a weary world longing for rescue. While we know that our savior has conquered death, we can also relate to the raw pain of knowing that the fullest relief and comfort will not be felt until the effects of sin’s curse are finally and definitively crushed. 

Perhaps it’s time to lean into the stress and difficulty of Christmastime. Maybe the relief that we feel in the season’s passing is a holy one, and we can delight in the truth that Jesus’s arrival was complicated and surrounded by some traumatic scandals. Our savior was born into a world of sin, and that sin continues to take its toll on humanity today.

If the only hope that you feel at Christmas is that it will eventually be over, perhaps you know the desperate need for creation’s redemption more intimately than those who presently rejoice. While Jesus’ birth is indeed good news for all mankind, we can take comfort in knowing that he himself was a man of sorrows. He knows our pain, our weariness, and our failures. And with full knowledge of our innermost being, he chose to come and dwell with us. 

God did not pre-arrange global fanfare or the most hospitable of conditions, but rather sent his beloved son into a sinful world that was hemorrhaging chaos, dysfunction, and pain. These are the realities of our very need for Jesus. His arrival is precisely for those who come to Christmas depleted, broken, and sinful. So perhaps he meets us most intimately not in the parties, programs, or Christmas music, but in the quiet wake of their passing. 

Lessons with a High Price Tag

If you are in the thick of some really hard things as a global worker, you’re in the right place. If I could, I’d invite you to my farmhouse in South Africa. We’d walk barefoot to admire the blooming birds-of-paradise and enchanting jade vine. We’d pick a dragon fruit straight off the vine and let the juice run down our elbows. And of course, you’d meet my chickens. They all have antiquated names like Mabel, Blanche, and Gertrude. Then we’d make coffee and sit awhile so I could hear your story and you could hear mine.

We’d talk about the raw beauty of the places we live. How we’ve changed since we came here. What we’ve gained and what we’ve lost. How we have communed with God and also how there’s been a felt distance. And eventually, we’d roll around to the things that left an indelible mark on our journeys as global workers. These are the lessons we paid a high price to learn. 

We’d find out that we’re not so alone in some of the costly mistakes we’ve made and that we hope others can avoid. Because we know they are common missteps in global work. And we don’t want to keep paying for them.

These lessons were taxing and suffocating at the time, but I cannot be the same after learning them. I’m left with deep gratitude that God didn’t leave me in those places with the insufficient version of who I thought he was and the shallow version of who I thought I was. 

And you would sip your coffee and nod in agreement.

I know you paid dearly for some of these lessons too. I’m sorry. I know they cost you or those around you. I also know that on the other side of these lessons lies a more robust and clear picture of who God really is and what freedom really looks like. 

I’d explain how I wish I could spare pre-fielders and new global workers this messy process, but that it’s through this very process that we begin to notice smudges on the window of our worldview that don’t belong. We begin to see God’s sovereign brilliance more clearly. God becomes bigger, and he makes us stronger.

And then I’d share with you the lessons that came with a high price tag in my own life. And I know you would have your own to share.

  1. God is the driver of change, not me. I am not capable of changing the inner workings of the human heart. Only God does that (Ezekiel 36:26). My sufficiency, ability, and responsibility ends with my love for and service to others, not in their visible transformation. 

Some people don’t want to change. They want charity, but not change (Luke 15:11-32). And they will encourage my generosity with façades of change. When I recognize the motivation, I am reminded to slow down and respect God’s process, even if I’m already heavily invested.  

I paid a high price in real life to learn that the father of the prodigal son did not chase after him, chain him to his home, and force him to stay. The father loved, released, and welcomed his son back home again once his heart was in a new place. 

Early in ministry, I did a lot of chasing. A lot of enmeshing. A lot of enabling. I learned what codependence is and how it cleverly masks as true relationship. I paid dearly to discover that my attempts to force an intrinsic desire for transformation are futile. God changes the heart, not me. This truth freed me. 

I tend to chase the outcome and not the source. God calls me to stay connected to the vine before chasing fruit for other people (John 15:5). Sometimes in our line of work, we run after the newsletter-worthy fruit in others to the detriment of fruit inside ourselves. 

My approach to people and service has adapted as my understanding of God’s sovereignty has grown. I no longer seek someone else’s transformation as fruit of my work. My only work is to remain connected to the Vine. In love, I focus on investing and releasing people to own their process with God. 

  1. God calls us to be as innocent as doves and as wise as serpents (Matthew 10:16). In my ministry, this has played out as a call to balance altruism with discernment. I’m altruistic by nature. A therapist once told me that many global workers are. True love, after all, is to lay down our life for another (John 15:13-14). 

But I’ve learned that altruism is often accompanied by naivety. And I’m not called to foolishness. God opened my eyes to recognize my tendency for altruism with pure abandon and helped me see that I have a duty to exercise muscles of discernment. 

Suspicion doesn’t suit me, and I don’t want it to, but there is wisdom in discernment. I’ve learned to beware of people who require constant rescuing or live in a perpetual state of conflict and drama, for my nature is to think that if I just help them one more time, they’ll finally be able to live a fruitful life.

For those who are altruistic by nature, saying no takes a lot more effort than yes, and I have learned to lean into that when needed. Because the wisdom of God helps me to love others better. 

  1. God is a forgiver (Ephesians 1:7). It feels like I’ve sinned more as a missionary than I ever did as a pre-fielder. Whether that’s actually true or not, there’s a reason it feels like it’s true. 

Stress is magnified in an environment where everything is unfamiliar and we’re learning to navigate a new life. We crave comfort. We crave the familiar. We need something to calm the heck down. We need to survive the moment so we don’t lose it on the people around us. Hard things start piling up faster than we can deal with them. They rage within and eventually claw their way out in the form of unhealthy habits. 

Unhealthy coping mechanisms surface or resurface. This happens more often than you might expect in global work. And it’s devastating. Because you’re just trying to do the right thing and you just want to serve God well. 

Here is also what is true. Cleansing lies in repentance (1 John 1:19). Change lies in seeking help (James 5:16). These two truths have been life to me. Maintaining a pristine reputation is far less important to me now than leaning into God’s forgiveness and seeking help when I need it. Because freedom lies in taking my humanity to him. 

  1. God gives me my daily bread and invites me to pray for it (Matthew 6:11).  If you rely on support like me, our entire livelihoods depend on the financial goodwill of donors. My current status and my future could be a lot more secure if I gave donors what I think they want: a moving story that appeals to their emotions. Even better if I attach an emotionally manipulative photo of a crying, snotty-nosed kid whose pigment is darker than mine. With flies on their eyes. Those tend to bring in lots of money.

But that is not serving. That is not loving. 

Growing up in Africa, I was impacted at an early age by a repulsion for the predatory nature I saw in the unfolding story of non-profit and humanitarian work around the world. The mindset seems to be, “If we can just get a good story, a great picture, we can get more money to help these poor people.”  We lose sight of our daily bread promise and our duty to the image-bearers in front of us when we exploit the people we serve in order to gain a buck. Even if it’s for them. 

This was a hard lesson I learned flipping through magazines at a young age. But God didn’t leave me in a state of anger and repulsion. I am eternally grateful for the honorable example that my parents set. They shared stories of the strength, beauty, ingenuity, and fortitude of the people in my Cameroonian community. I think they did this because they actually saw my Cameroonian neighbors as image-bearers of God. And because they trusted in God to move the hearts of their donors through stories of the strength and dignity of his people. Not through human efforts at emotional manipulation.  

My newsletter readers won’t get the sexy, sensationalized stories from me. Or the pictures that prey on the dignity of the people God has called me to serve, though those stories and images do exist in my work. But exposing someone else’s story in order to make a buck is not the love to which I’m called. It’s proven to be the quickest path to making more money, but it’s not my path. And I hope it isn’t yours. 

God is the creator of the people I serve, and they deserve honor. I am yoked to him in his work for his people, and his way offers life, freedom, dignity, and a love covering. He will take care of me. I don’t have to harm other people to get what’s mine. His daily bread is mine. And by God’s beautiful, miraculous grace, our incredible financial partners of 10+ years get that. 

  1. God has a pattern of redeeming the broken things and of showing us his goodness (Psalm 27:13-14). That may not be everyone’s story all the time, but it’s an overarching theme for many of us. In the hardest seasons when ministry has “gone wrong,” I’ve looked hard for that redemption. I’ve prayed to see his goodness. The puzzle pieces may not come together until years later. Or maybe not at all this side of heaven. 

But more often than not, I’ve been surprised by my surprise when he does indeed fix broken things. It might have been nice to learn the depth and breadth of God’s redemption without having to lose “all these things,” but without the loss, I wouldn’t have truly understood that everything was his to rebuild.

When ministries fold, when plans A, B, and C don’t pan out, when partnerships wane and relationships crumble, I’m told to wait and look for his goodness. It doesn’t mean that every tragedy ends in a miracle. But boy, have I seen some miracles. God repairs dormant relationships, raises up new partners, creates better plans, and builds new ministries. He is so good.

We’d probably cry over the losses and laugh at how appalling some of these stories actually are. We’d curl up and drink two more cups of coffee until it was time to feed my chickens. We’d check on Mabel, Blanch, and Gertrude, and we’d be grateful, though still healing, from the lessons that brought us together. We’d share comfort in remembering the things that felt costly and in which more often than not, God became bigger and he made us stronger.

Photo by Taryn Elliot on Pexels.

Glancing in the Rearview Mirror

by Jessi Bullis

I was in my first car crash in May 2023. I had just gotten off a flight and was too hungry to complete my 90-minute drive home before eating (there always seems to be those awkward lengths of time between meals on flying days). It was pouring rain, and I pulled off at an unknown town in search of a late dinner. Traffic was coming up on a stop light, and while we all seemed to slow down quicker than anticipated, I came to a stop with room to spare. Glancing in my rearview mirror, I noted that the car behind me had enough space to fully stop. 
   
Less than a second afterwards, I felt the impact. I later found out I was actually the third car to get hit from behind in a four-car pile-up. 
   
Before that moment I had never really thought about getting hit from behind. It wasn’t a concern. For some reason I just had a lot of trust in other cars around me. Maybe it’s because I grew up in countries with incredible drivers who could fit four cars to a road, squeeze through any narrow street, and make lane switching in traffic jams look effortless. Or maybe it’s simply because I hadn’t yet experienced it.

 

Focusing on the Rearview Mirror

For many years, the way I “processed” the heavy (and even exciting) emotions that came with my Third Culture Kid (TCK) experience was to simply disregard them. 

The announcement would come that we were moving to another country, that yet another friend was leaving, or that the thing I was looking forward to was cancelled because of some complication with living abroad. And I would just shut down. Try to put on a blank face. Spew out some platitude about God’s goodness.

I would tell myself, “Emotions make you look weak and only get in the way of moving forward.” So I just kept pushing on, driving forward while never looking back. 

Years later, once my body very suddenly and drastically had its fill of painful circumstances going unprocessed and I developed an autoimmune disease, I was forced to look back as though I’d been hit from behind. In response, I began doing the heavy lifting of truly honouring my experiences and allowing myself to finally feel the waves of emotions that came with long-ago moves and crises.

As I realized just how much my refusal to process had stunted my emotional growth, I completely pendulum-swung from my “shoving down” mentality. I felt like I couldn’t move forward unless I had completely processed every single block on my Grief Tower. 

I was trying to gain control of something, anything, because I felt so very out of control. Suddenly I was trying to drive while only looking through the rearview mirror. 

As you can imagine, it was terribly painful. I became burnt out on grief processing and eventually learned that there needs to be a balance of intentionally looking back and intentionally looking forward, while also acknowledging and enjoying where I’m currently at. 
   

Taking in All Angles

In my grief-processing journey, I’ve learned something surprising. No matter how good you are at the balancing act of processing past grief while still looking forward, sometimes you get unexpectedly rear-ended by past grief that you thought you’d dealt with. No matter how much I check my mirrors, no matter how good of a driver I am, and no matter how safe an area I seem to be in, I’m not immune to being hit from behind.

We can feel like we are managing life well, just driving along. But then something from our past sneaks up behind us and taps us on our bumper – or maybe even causes a full collision. 

My car has been my safe space. It’s where I’ve done all my most profound processing. As an introvert, I have found I have the clearest thoughts in my car because it’s one of the few places I can find absolute solitude. It is in this space that I feel completely free to perform my “scream-singing” as I blast music to release any intense frustration, agony, and joy I may be feeling (my go-to song for emotional release is “Life is a Highway” by Rascal Flatts, which seems all too fitting here). 

But after this accident I was nervous about even getting into my car. Suddenly my safe space felt dangerous. And when I did drive, I spent a lot of time nervously surveillancing my rearview mirror in fear that I would be hit from behind again. When our past comes knocking, it can feel disorienting. 

This is where I anticipate you saying, “Great, so you’re saying I can never fully relax? My past will never be fully processed?” What a terrible thought. And no, that’s not what I’m saying.  Rather, remember that life has ups and downs that are outside your control, and it’s not your fault. 

I often felt that when my past came back to haunt me, it was my fault — that clearly I hadn’t processed well enough. I felt ashamed that my “ghost of Christmas past” was returning for a visit. 

Control is something we TCKs tend to struggle with. After years of losing friends and community and stability over and over, seeking out “control” can feel desperate and hopeless. 

Yes, we can’t be in control of everything, but we can choose to give ourselves grace as we remember that the waves of life are not our fault. When we choose to remember that sometimes collisions just happen, the emotional weight of “fault” gets lifted. 

There’s only so much contingency preparation I can do, and there are only so many hours in the day for therapy and processing and – oh yeah – everyday life also. 

There’s a need to intentionally glance backwards. We cannot fully accept ourselves and move forward if we do not gently and graciously love our past selves. We need to take into account the circumstances we faced growing up because they are impacting the person we are today – how we make decisions, invest in relationships, and care for ourselves. 

It’s important to intentionally create space to process, whether it’s taking a Saturday afternoon to journal or do an art project while considering processing questions, talking with a friend, or sitting down with a counselor. (Check out this emotional processing activity guide for processing suggestions you can implement.) 

There’s also a need to steer forward. The rearview mirror should not be our focal point. There’s a reason you got in the car: you have a goal or endpoint in mind! We need to remember those goals as we move moving forward in hope. 

And there’s a need to be aware of who you are and where you are. Sometimes we just need to live life, not pull out another piece of our past to process, not plan the turn we’re going to make in five miles, but rather allow ourselves to be present and enjoy the moment.

For some months after the accident I had to be gentle with myself, evaluating my emotional stability and prioritizing self-compassion. It took time, but eventually my car became my safe space again, because I had allowed myself to authentically show up how I needed each day. 

Collisions will happen. Our past will come knocking throughout life. That doesn’t mean we’ve failed, and that doesn’t always mean we haven’t done enough processing. Yes, processing the past is important, but we can’t get stuck driving through our rearview mirror. We need to balance looking back and looking forward while remembering that sometimes life hits us from behind. And we can give ourselves grace for that too. 

Photo by Olga Nayda on Unsplash

~~~~~~~~

Jessi is an Adult MK who grew up in Singapore, England, Turkey, and Germany. She has a heart for TCKs and the unique struggles they face. She uses her undergraduate in psychology and a seminary degree in counseling to create resources and serve TCK and their families as the Director of Adult TCK services at TCK Training. Jessi loves getting to walk through the repatriation journey with Adult TCKs, as this season can be especially difficult to navigate. Her deepest passion is for TCKs to know and feel the love and goodness of God in how they are cared for.

When Christmas Loses Its Magic

Christmas was magical until my grandpa died when I was 14. Up until that point Christmas had been the highlight of every year. But something seemed to die when he died. Several years later, another tragic death hit us. After that, Christmases were never the same. It was more a season of ache than joy.

Throughout my twenties, the Christmas season sometimes seemed to mock me with all its giddiness when I felt so broken. Unfulfilled desires, chronic illness, separation from loved ones, and homesickness were unwanted guests that exposed brokenness, especially at Christmas.

Enter Advent – the four-week period in the church calendar right before Christmas that both remembers Christ’s birth and anticipates His second coming. I grew up as an evangelical in a Roman Catholic country. We didn’t practice anything that hinted at Roman Catholicism. Observing the church calendar or its liturgies was not a thing I was aware of.

But since I started observing Advent in the last seven years or so, it has been a game changer for me. It has taught me to live in paradox. It has freed me up to treasure the joy of Christ’s first coming while also mourning that He hasn’t come back yet.

Advent enables me not to resent that the Christmas season is polluted with grief. It heightens the reality that I am a woman in waiting – waiting for consummation and for the return of my bridegroom. The small story of my life is simply joining the history of the world. I am doing what history has always been doing: groaning as it waits for one of the two comings of Jesus.

Paradox at Christmastime is just as it should be. Christ’s first coming was filled with paradox. When Simeon saw Christ in the temple, he both rejoiced and prophesied sorrow. Even as he praised God when he saw the long awaited salvation of God’s people, he also told Mary that this baby whom she had just delivered, and who would deliver her, would do so at a great cost to her. “A sword will pierce through your own soul.” The same baby would bring judgment to some and exaltation to others (Luke 2:34-35).

His second coming will also be filled with paradox. What will mean glory for all those who have longed for his appearing will mean wailing for those who pierced him. While His children sing, His enemies will bow in terror (Revelation 1:7).

For me, the difference between simply celebrating Christmas and practicing Advent has a lot to do with how I face December. I am not only looking forward to Christmas Day (or Noche Buena in Hispanic countries). I am not only just going to (or hosting) parties. I no longer expect myself to just be happy.

Instead, I allow time every day to both remember Christ’s birth and anticipate his second coming. I give space to sit in my grief, in my current unfulfilled longings and fears. I bring them honestly to my Father. I don’t try to mask them or stuff them down “because Christmas!” I am ok with the tension. Yes, Praise God, Christ was born! And life is not what it should be.

The point is not exactly how you observe Advent. I don’t always do the same thing every year. Some years I read through a devotional during Advent. Several years ago, I read through Isaiah using Tony Reinke’s #isaiahchristmas plan. We light candles at dinner with the kids, keeping it very dark at the beginning of December and then making it brighter the closer it gets to Christmas Day.

We have used Ann Voskamp’s Unwrapping the Greatest Gift, adding ornaments to a Jesse Tree every day. Other years we have focused on a name of Christ a day as a way of counting down to Christmas. Another year I went on a journey through the Scriptures in Handel’s Messiah every day.

I think the point has far more to do with the paradigm you have for this season, rather than how exactly you practice it. Are you ok with living in paradox? Are you aware that you are a person in waiting? Do you believe your unfulfilled longings, brokenness, and grief fit perfectly with this time?

Living into Advent has helped me to fix my gaze – and my hope – past Christmas to the Resurrection and the return of my King and Brother.

Christmas is a joy not because it is filled with undiluted joy. It is a joy because it testifies that just as the Incarnation truly happened, He is certainly coming back again. Because of Christmas, I am hastening the coming of Resurrection in clouds of great glory. Then, at last, everything sad will be untrue.

O Lord Jesus, come! We miss you so.

Dear Sending Church: We Need to Get the Parents of Missionaries on Board

My mom sits at her mom’s breakfast table, wailing and pleading. My grandmother sits opposite her, wailing and angry. 

It is one of my earliest memories.

I’d never heard so much emotion out of either of them, and the sunny little room encircled by cabinets of glassware suddenly felt tense, alarming, to my five-year-old soul.

My Gram struggled to accept that we were moving to Africa, so that day at her table was one of many tense conversations. In her anger that my mom was taking away her grandchildren, Gram even consulted a lawyer to see if she could sue for custody. 

During our first two-year term in Liberia, we faithfully sent her letters and pictures. My mom tape-recorded my brother’s and my voices and mailed the cassettes off too. Gram didn’t call once during the entire two years. She didn’t send a single letter. Her anger and grief consumed her. 

My grandmother never understood my parents’ love for Jesus, so their motivation to become missionaries didn’t make sense to her either. But unfortunately, her response wasn’t all that different from many parents who do share their children’s faith. 

In Mobilizing Gen Z, Jolene Erlacher and Katy White quote the Future of Missions study from Barna: “Only 35 percent of engaged Christian parents of young adults say they would definitely encourage their child to serve in missions, while 25 percent are not open to the idea at all.”

They continue, “Career success and physical safety are the top concerns. Nearly half said, ‘I’d rather my child get a well-paying job than be a career missionary.’”

Reading this didn’t come as a surprise to me. I coach new missionaries as they are preparing to move overseas, so I hear their stories of conflict and heartache with parents who don’t approve. Keep in mind that this disapproval often comes from engaged Christian parents – people who have surrendered their lives to Christ, who are hearing the Word of God preached every Sunday. So what is happening here?

Maybe we’ve all just become a lot more fearful in the last few years. Maybe churches have let their missions programs fade away. Maybe Christians have latched on to the idea that two-week stints are all that’s needed for transformative ministry.

I hear many people protest that our own country has its own share of problems, so shouldn’t we narrow our focus here? And that’s true – but we also have churches on every corner. Have we forgotten that almost half of the world’s population has little or no access to the gospel of Jesus Christ? Will we remember that Christ’s final command to His followers was to disciple the nations? 

When every book tells us to live our best life now, when every advertisement whispers that we need more, deserve more, it’s easy to believe that this life is about our personal fulfillment. We forget that there has always been a cost to the gospel, and that cost might include our most significant treasures. Our comfort. Our dreams. Our children. Or perhaps even more gut-wrenching – our grandchildren. 

My own children are nearing adulthood, and I am beginning to comprehend the depth of the grief I would feel if one of them lived across an ocean. I don’t want to minimize the engulfing sorrow I would experience if I had to watch my grandchildren grow up over Zoom calls.

The sacrifice of missions is real, it’s deep, it’s enduring. Those who leave feel it acutely, but sometimes we forget that those who are left behind feel it just as much. 

The sacrifices only make sense in the light of eternity. Do we have the faith to believe that Christ is worth it? 

Churches are often good at inspiring young people with a fresh vision for the Great Commission, sparking in them a passion for bringing the gospel to the ends of the earth. We send our students to Urbana and Cross Con; we sponsor them on short-term trips. 

Yet I can’t help but wonder: How many young people have felt convicted to pursue career missions but can’t find the courage to devastate their God-fearing parents? 

So while we exhort our young people to serve God wherever He calls them in the world, let’s also rally their parents to be their biggest cheerleaders, to open their hands and release their fears and their dreams to the One who sacrificed His own Son so that we might be redeemed.    

And when we celebrate and send out new missionaries, let us also remember the pain of their parents. They need our special attention, a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on. They need the church to be their surrogate family when their own is ten thousand miles away. They need us to give them the vision of how their sacrifice is an equal part of the Great Commission. Our Savior is worth it. 

Resources for parents of missionaries:
A book: Missionary Mama’s Survival Guide: Compassionate Help for the Mothers of Cross-Cultural Workers by Tori Havercamp 
A website: Parents of Goers
An article: Senders Make Sacrifices Too
A ministry: Parents of Missionaries Ministry

Photo from Dobrila Vignjevic

A Different Kind of Goodbye

by J. Daniel Sims 

photo credit: Brant Copen

We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.
(C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed)

It is a rare peaceful, sunny afternoon on a usually rainy, usually war-torn hilltop in Northern Myanmar when I break down for the first time on my new life path.

These last six months brought me closer to the dead and dying and at a greater frequency than many Americans will ever experience. This exposure shook something loose in me, ultimately transforming the way I view and approach life. But this death, across 10,000 miles of ocean, was different, closer somehow.

My family is all together now, minus two key people. One of them is me.

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I was the first grandson and for 20 months thrived as the sole treasure of the family. Then Andrew was born. Even before my sister, Andrew was my first playmate. He was a meaningful part of every memory with Mom’s side of the family tree.

Most of our interactions took place at the “farm,” my grandfather’s yawning plot of west Texas clay. My visits to the farm were often separated by large periods of time, gaps which grew in length as the years wore on. Proximity ultimately stifled the full development of our friendship, but I always considered Andrew the closest thing I had to a brother.

Andrew lived near the farm, and every month my family would come to visit. We would always pick up right where we left off: exploring the fields, playing hide n’ go seek in the farmhouse, trying for hours just to get a single ball through the towering, rusty, old basketball net.

As time passed, the monthly trips turned into every few months, but the fun only increased as my sister and his brother joined the ranks: camping in the fields, building a fortress in the barn, throwing apples at the cows, two-on-two at the rusty, old basketball net.

Then we moved north and only made it out to the farm a couple of times a year. But whenever we did, everything was beautifully unchanged. Our club of cousins really was family: 4-wheeling around the fields, fishing by the tank, climbing races to the top of the rusty, old basketball net.

But twice a year turned to once, and once to “when we can,” and the assembly of our childhood army lost its regularity. Nearly two years had passed when I headed back to the farm for Pappaw’s funeral. A fifth cousin, Andrew’s youngest brother, had long been added to the ranks and was now six years old. Somewhere along the way, we had all grown up, Andrew perhaps the most visibly.

During Pappaw’s final days, Andrew had grown into a leader at the farm and in life. He was excelling at university and prepping for law school (a veritable family tradition). At home, he was looking after his brothers and spending a lot of time with a special girl named Ashley.

That summer he had stopped by the old house every day to check in on Mammaw and Pappaw. Whether to bring them the mail, or deliver some groceries, or just to say hi, he was there. The farm became just another place where he could make a difference: plowing the fields, taking care of the cows, thoughtfully repainting the rusty old basketball net.

I was thoroughly impressed by the changes in Andrew’s life, changes I was actively seeking in my own. Though time certainly forced its way between us, the friendship was just as we remembered.

I’ll never forget my last trip to the farm. Andrew and I were worn out from spending an hour or so trying to dunk on a refinished – yet unmistakably old – basketball net. (I never quite got it, but I think he did.)

We headed around the house and met the other three cousins. The five of us just sat there under the flag, tossing a football, and enjoying each other’s company for the rest of the afternoon. I couldn’t stop thinking to myself how lucky I was to have such a family, so separated by time and distance, but still – in many ways – so beautifully close.

As the sun set, we hugged our goodbyes and headed back to school and life on opposite sides of the world. That was the last time I heard from Andrew.

//

There I sat, alone and confused on this hillside in Northern Myanmar, seeking in this strange land the sort of personal transformation which became real for Andrew in his own home town.

My family was all together, minus two key people. One of them was me.

Editor’s Note: This essay was excerpted from Sims’s new book WanderLOST: stories from the winding road to significance, which was released on April 1st. I had the privilege of reading an early copy of the manuscript and gave this endorsement:

“In Wanderlost, Jacob tells a story that is so particular it becomes universal, especially for the traveler or the globally minded Christ-follower. But anyone who has searched for meaning, identity, or community will find in him a fellow seeker. At times hilarious and at times painful, Wanderlost is at all times compelling.” –Elizabeth Trotter

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J. Daniel Sims currently serves as Country Director of International Justice Mission (IJM) Cambodia, where he leads a team of investigators, lawyers, social workers, and programmatic and operational staff in the fight against violent labor exploitation. Concurrently with his role at IJM, he serves as a Non-Resident Fellow at Duke University’s Center for Reconciliation, a leading institute bridging the worlds of research and practice in the global peace-building and justice space. Sims is frequently drawn upon for expert commentary on various human rights and global development challenges. His analysis has featured in The Economist, The Guardian, Forbes, LA Times, Al Jazeera, VICE World News, Sydney Morning Herald, ProPublica, The American Interest, Plough, The Hill, and World News Group.