missions – A Life Overseas |

When Callings Collide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Theodor Moise on Pixabay

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

Contending With Broken Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

photo by Pexels on Pixabay

Responsibly Bridging the Gap Between Needs and Resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What resources do I have access to?

How can those resources be useful in my context?

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

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

Photo from Unsplash by Alex Radelich

Our One and Only True Calling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Priscilla Du Preeze on Unsplash

What You May Not Know

Someone near and dear to me, we’ll call her Marla, is fighting an up hill battled at her church to keep you—those on the field—remembered and cared for.

Over the years, pastors have come and gone. Some for natural, understandable reasons and some for reasons that have left hurt, confusion, and chaos in their wake.

Being on the field for any period of time, you are familiar with the ebbs and flows and changes that occur in your sending church or churches. It’s a familiar story for missionaries to be sent to the field from a well-connected and known position. Equally familiar, as the years go by, leadership changes and with new leadership might come new focuses or priorities. You’ve probably experienced a church that sent you with a financial committed that either increased or decreased over the years as your needs, their ability, and their priorities change.

So far, I haven’t said anything new or revolutionary. You know this. I know this.

Lead pastors have come and gone. Mission pastors have come and gone. What the “mission committee” looks like has morphed over the years. They are currently needing to hire several new key staff members at the church and may be shifting who is “responsible” for missions and missionaries around again.

Marla is one of the people at her church who has stayed the same over the years. She’s the one who knows your name, knows your ministry, prays for your kids, and does her best to create opportunities for you to share when you are on furlough.

I have been thinking about her. Probably the majority of the missionaries sent from their church have no idea the meetings she schedules with the pastors, advocating for missionaries. They don’t know of the “battles” (why does it have to feel like it takes so much energy, effort, and girding of loins) on your behalf. Marla reads through the budget and speaks up when your needs might be overlooked and under budgeted. They would be surprised to know that she’s paid a price on their behalf because she’s done it quietly, faithfully, and without a title. So, few know. Most do not.

I share this to remind you that one of the challenges of living far away from those who sent you, is that you probably don’t know of the quiet, faithful souls who are advocating on your behalf. They take partnership with you and God seriously and count it a privilege to be a part of your ministry.

Today, let’s pause, and thank God for those faithful servants like Marla. If you’re thinking, “I don’t have anyone like that.” You probably do, you just don’t know it—because that’s how they roll. Thank God for those who have stood in the gap for you—unseen, unpaid, and unwavering.

Fighting for Awe and Wonder – And Why It Matters

It was her question that I couldn’t shake. The type of question where harsh reality clashes with idealism. And I couldn’t ignore the drive to chase an answer, even if it took months to unpack. Or in this case, twelve months.

“How do we maintain awe and wonder?”

She wasn’t asking because I knew the answer. She’s way smarter than I am. She was asking because she sensed that our souls earnestly wanted to discover some answers together—or at least start trying as we meandered the whimsical neighborhoods of Portland. Her poodle sniffed a statue of Ramona Quimby at the Beverly Cleary Park.

Speaking of awe and wonder while exploring my favorite childhood author’s hometown and secretly snapping selfies outside her childhood home was the backdrop to her inspired question. Standing where Beverly Cleary would have sipped lemonade and chased playmates in Mary Jane shoes felt surreal. Ramona, Beezus, Henry, Ribsy, and even Scooter, and their white-picket-fence lives were friends who flooded my imagination as a child. I devoured their stories—where the biggest challenge is the neighbor’s complaint of your scruffy dog—over and over by the flicker of a kerosene lantern in a village in Africa.

The spark of our awe and wonder conversation felt magical, and everything in me was alive. The fact that I was having this exchange with a brilliant children’s book illustrator made it all the more invigorating.

Until I found out the hard truths about Beverly Cleary’s dingy childhood. There wasn’t much sipping of lemonade and chasing of friends along idyllic streets like I’d always imagined. It seems like her writing was less of a memoir and more of an escape to places deeply longed for.

It hurt to shatter the romantic lens. It was also inspiring. Because there was no better place for me to begin to wrestle with the question of how to maintain awe and wonder in a dark world than outside the childhood home of an author who lived this tension.

How do I maintain awe and wonder in a world that’s bent on crushing it?

And why does it matter? In a world where the bodies of children are swept away by swirling waters in Texas, the children in warring strips of lands are paying for centuries of conflict, and the minority children in Cameroon have been prohibited from attending school for fear of their lives, why does it matter to the beating of my very soul if I fight for a sense of awe and wonder? These things feel secondary when I can’t even ensure the protection of the least of these.

Twelve months later, I still don’t have a clean answer, but I’d like to share what I’ve learned so far and open the conversation to learn from you. I’m pretty sure if you’re reading this, you’ve lived a hard journey across global borders, raised children in hard places, served the unseen, lost a lot, been hurt a lot, wrestled with God a lot, and maybe, just maybe, have lost some awe and wonder in the process. So I think this community has something to teach me.

Why does any of this matter? Why did this question resonate with me and all of humanity?

Because the opposite of awe and wonder is everything that tears us apart from each other and from God. They are the things that disconnect us, suck our souls dry, separate us from empathy for our neighbor, and drive us away from praise. In stark contrast to awe is cynicism, indifference, disenchantment, boredom. On the farthest end of the spectrum of the human experience from wonder is jadedness, apathy, detachment, contempt, and dread.

A dreary worldview leads us to disconnection, comparison, and inaction. It leads us to seeing others as less than fully human and a growing disdain for the many forms of the goodness of God. We lose our ability to love selflessly and take on pride, gossip, narcissistic tendencies, and even war.

I do not want to be accustomed to these things taking up space in my heart. They are diametrically opposed to awe and wonder. I can hardly think of a closer description of hell. Or things that take my mind further from the heart of God.

Against a landscape of evil, hardness, hyper-self-preservation, disconnection, ingratitude, and danger, I must engage awe and wonder because it leads me to

praise God better,
which leads me to softness,
which leads me to share,
which leads me to connect,
which leads me to appreciate,
which leads me to protect.

As a teen full of imagination and wonder, someone informed me that my rose-colored glasses were evidence of a head buried in sand and that my wonder insulted the pain of others. More than anything, I didn’t want to participate in disregarding the pain of others.

So, instead of learning to better balance the pain of the world with my bursting curiosity, I tried to be mature like them. Bury liveliness. Embrace cynicism. Because jaded people seemed super informed, albeit crippled by inaction.

As someone who has lived and worked overseas for decades, I’m painfully aware that the pursuit and expression of beauty may be interpreted as disloyalty and abandonment of those in hard seasons.

But the abandonment of wonder left me hollow. So, I’m back at this question again.

Practically speaking, how do we do this? For starters, we need to name the things that deoxygenate our awe and loot us of joy. Screens. Inauthentic experiences. Passivity. Pride. Hypervigilant self-focus. Reading comments online—where criticism is acutely trained to detect imperfection and is blind to the bravery it took someone to produce art or work.

But simply avoiding thieves of joy isn’t what makes us connected and full. Our beings were made to actively seek the beautiful things that make us fully aware of God and in tune with each other. Here are a few fertile places I’ve found.

Good theology matters. Perhaps there was some level of truth that my childlike awe and wonder neglected to acknowledge the hard things of life, a TCK phenomenon I am only now grasping in my line of work with TCK research. Perhaps a better worldview and a deeper theology would have me explore the complex and uncomfortable truths—learning to hold in tension the beautiful and the hard—and that sometimes the hard is beautiful and the beautiful is hard. Perhaps my heart was meant for deeper worship without reservation when I am called to build a more solid theology of God’s goodness, suffering, sin, and to honor the feeling of paradox of things I don’t fully understand now, but will someday. Perhaps the greatest way to honor the good with awe and wonder is to acknowledge the hard and whisper an invitation for the Holy Spirit to be my teacher (John 14:26).
Cultivate tenderness. Tenderness sees the brokenhearted, turns the throat-lump into sea water running down cheeks, delights in the petal formation of a rose, pauses to ponder the markings of a toad, rebels against the overloaded schedule, believes the best in disquieting misunderstandings, and makes creamy chai for the neighbor. If tenderness is a soft landing place missing from our ability to breathe, stop, praise, notice, engage, maybe it’s time to go back to the root of love—the type that bears, believes, hopes, and endures the things trying to break us (1 Cor. 13:7).
Throw off the things holding me back. With haste. A good, hard look in the mirror paired with the sacred work of the Holy Spirit burns the secrets holding me back from the Father’s innocence, joy, awe, and empathy. Hebrews 12:1 is a much sweeter bid to freedom than a list of shoulds and condemnation. It is the invitation to drink deep of the things that make me alive and release the things that threaten to sink me. It is a call to marinate in Shalom peace, receive it, root in it, fruit it, and share it.
Train my eyes upon the unnoticed things. God delights in the song of the sparrow, Leviathan’s froth from playing in the sea, and he even cares about the sorrow of the tax collector. It’s pausing to admire delicate forest fungi while hiking among towering redwoods or listening to the layers of music in a song you’ve heard a hundred times. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. The innocent delight in the little things. To be easily awed is an enviable art these days.

For the past twelve months and twenty-one days, I’ve been sitting on the question I bring to you today: “How do we maintain awe and wonder. And why does it matter?”

Perhaps the steps of Beverly Cleary’s childhood house was the perfect place to begin wrestling with this question. The gift of her whimsical stories didn’t stem from an idyllic childhood but from a place of longing. Joy and wonder didn’t erase the scarcity but became an intentional step out of the dreariness.

So what about you? How do you fight for awe and wonder?

Photo by Chris G. Pexels.

Why We Need “Ineffective” Missionaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is an “ineffective” ministry completely fruitless?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would answer emphatically: no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Yurii Khomitskyi on Unsplash

Could God Be Preparing TCKs to Meet the Deepest Needs of This Generation?

Growing up overseas offers children an incredible opportunity to develop a global perspective based on the lived experiences of forming personal connections across cultures. I’ve certainly seen that unfold from my own childhood, and in my work as an expat consultant, I’m watching the next generation carry forward a global mindset that is making an exceptional impact on relationships, identities, and a strong witness for Christ. But this doesn’t happen by accident.

My own story began as an American child living in Cameroon, where my parents served as Wycliffe Bible translators. Our missionary life started the day our ivory family of six spilled out of our Nissan truck and into the lives of an ebony clan who would become family, changing me forever. Two decades earlier, an elder of their village had written a plea to Wycliffe for a Bible translation in his language. He unknowingly forged the path that would make me a Third Culture Kid — someone who spent a significant amount of their childhood years abroad.

Growing up in Cameroon shaped me profoundly. It made other people’s experiences anything but distant. News of war in Africa wasn’t a faceless story. I shared life with people who were killed or displaced in Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis. My husband is a TCK whose family lived through not one, not two, but several evacuations from war-torn countries. The people who experienced days without potable water, dehydration, hushing their babies while hiding in the bush, homemade bombs going off at social gatherings, retribution for speaking out, the terrible silence of ghost towns, and the wailing of women were not nameless people in a news article to me.

A childhood spent with these people also made their joys anything but distant. The children they birthed were babies I carried on my back and celebrated when they brought home their first report cards. Witnessing the people of my childhood hold the Word of God in their own language for the first time wasn’t just a media post I swiped past. It was sacred and deeply moving — the culmination of sharing 20 years of my family’s life with a community that fed me beans from the same bowls as their children, taught me their songs and stories around kitchen fires, boiled herbal medicine when I was sick, and cried shouts of joy when they hugged me home from boarding school. They were worth sacrificing for, and they felt the same way about us.

Growing up between worlds gives children the chance to experience the love, joy, loss, pain, and victory of our global neighbors in a deeply personal way — one that often moves them to action later as adults. Often unaware of their own strengths, Adult TCKs tend to be highly sought after in today’s job market due to essential skills that were developed as a result of their globally-mobile childhood.

According to wealth management companies Creative Planning International and Sable International, ATCK skills include compassion, empathy, adaptability, open-mindedness, independence, resilience, problem-solving, and the ability to consider multiple perspectives.¹ These qualities are increasingly rare and extremely attractive in a Western backdrop marked by divisiveness, screen saturation, and overstimulation. This growing recognition is fueling the rise of world schoolers, families who choose to work remotely to provide real-world, cross-cultural experiences as the foundation for their children’s education.

Globally raised children are poised to make a significant impact on the next generation on a spiritual level too. Their experiences abroad foster carefully curated skills that will directly address the projected societal deficiencies of Gen Alpha. Experts predict that Gen Alpha will face psychological challenges from digital lives, including unsustainable pace, relentless change, lack of genuine connection, lack of face-to-face contact, risk-aversion, real-world interaction deficiencies, fragmented attention, and more.² Additional challenges include social fragmentation, polarization, and difficulty forming meaningful relationships. We already see warning signs of this in Gen Z.

God’s heart for all people compels us to prepare ourselves and our kids with the tools necessary to minister to each generation’s unique challenges. 1 Timothy 2:3-4 reminds us of the breadth of God’s heart: “This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”³ So, how will we reach them?

I believe today’s TCKs are uniquely positioned to minister to Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s challenges with a clarity of the gospel that is a direct result of their global upbringing. TCK Training’s 2024 survey of 1,643 adult TCKs representing 92 nationalities uncovered exciting information about the third culture kid experience.⁴ Their strengths align remarkably well with the skills needed to meet future challenges:

93% of adult TCKs report having a broad worldview — a crucial skill in addressing complex spiritual questions in an information-saturated generation.
83% see themselves as bridges between cultures — a critical capability in holding the core truth of scripture in tension with an increasingly polarized culture.
83% report compassion as a strength — a necessary trait as Gen Alpha is projected to be more deficient in meaningful face-to-face contact than previous generations.
82% report adaptability — an essential skill as Gen Z and Gen Alpha face complex issues with unprecedented access to information.
78% report open-mindedness — an important tool in an increasingly globalized world.

When I consider the reported strengths of TCKs, I can’t help but wonder if God is purposefully building Gen Z and Gen Alpha TCKs to minister to the wounds of their own generation. Is it possible that God will use their upbringing between cultures to bridge the gap and equip them with a profound clarity of the lived gospel? Might this powerfully shake the world and bring healing to our spiritual sickness?

But here’s the caveat. This only holds true when it’s done well.

Over the last few generations, the international community has learned painful lessons about the importance of intentional parenting in the expat context. We would do well to learn from what works and what doesn’t in raising kids abroad. While the TCK experience offers a valuable and rich foundation, mishandling it can lead to grave repercussions. TCKs are at higher risk for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) than other populations, which can result in long-term physical and mental health complications when left unattended.⁵

Does this mean parents should avoid raising children abroad? Absolutely not.

Consider this analogy: I’m at risk for plantar fasciitis. Should I avoid walking, hiking, or running? Recent studies show that a sedentary lifestyle is as harmful to my health as smoking and diabetes. In fact, not exercising was found to increase risk of death by 500%.⁶ Avoiding exercise is not the answer to my fullest and healthiest life. Instead, I researched triggers and mitigating factors and pursued an active lifestyle while investing in supportive shoes, stretching, and taking breaks when I detected pain.

In the same way, parents can raise TCKs while addressing specific risks and implementing mitigating factors. Due to mobility, the number one risk factor for TCKs is loss of connection—with primary caregivers and with community. Stress for parents, frequent moves, and the loss of familiar environments all heighten this risk.

This is where the power of TCK-informed parenting comes in. If loss of connection is the primary risk factor for TCKs, what would happen if TCK connection were centralized in the expat community?

In 2019, Dr. Christina Bethell conducted a study of 6,188 people at John Hopkins to determine which childhood factors built resilience instead of fragility in adult mental health.⁷ She found that even children who had experienced mild to severe trauma in childhood went on to have greater resilience and better mental and emotional health in adulthood if they also had positive connections with primary caregivers, peers, and the community.⁸ The study further showed that Positive Childhood Experiences, or PCEs, had a cumulative effect in that the more PCEs a child had, the greater their health in adulthood.

This study’s impact on preventive care science leaves us with hope that increasing access to PCEs may alter the trajectory of children at risk for trauma and higher ACE scores. It further explains the significant and lasting difference that caregivers and the community make in raising a healthy generation.

The eight PCEs are:

The ability to talk with family about feelings.
The sense that family is supportive during difficult times.
Feeling safe and protected by an adult in the home.
Feeling supported by friends.
Feeling a sense of belonging in high school.
Participating in community traditions.
Having at least two non-parent adults who genuinely cared (Pinetree Institute).
Belonging to a multi-generational group.

Each of the PCEs center on connection, starting with the primary caregiver and then extending to the wider community. Children who consistently had 6-7 PCEs were 72% less likely to develop mental illness in adulthood. Those who had 3-5 were 50% less likely to develop depression and poor mental health.⁹ Everyone plays a stewardship role in building vibrant childhoods — from parents, to peers, and the wider community.

Many of us in the expat community are painfully aware of crash-and-burn stories of TCKs whose needs were put on the backburner in a passionate pursuit of global work. Even armed with these insights as a TCK mom, I was not immune to my own blindspots and moments of disconnection. However, as an expat family instructor, I am deeply encouraged by today’s TCK parents and their strong commitment to centralize the needs of the family as a launching point for effective ministry, not a secondary consideration.

It is true that TCKs are at higher risk than other populations for a high ACE score largely due to mobility and loss of connection. Yet the good news is clear: Positive Childhood Experiences grounded in meaningful relationships have a protective and lasting effect. Even in the face of adversity, children who experience strong family bonds, supportive friendships, and a sense of belonging are significantly more resilient and healthy.

As an expat parent, it is within your hands to nurture your child’s potential to become spiritually whole themselves before becoming a globally aware citizen who brings God’s healing touch to their generation. It starts with TCK-informed parenting — knowing the risks, focusing on connection, and raising spiritually and emotionally vibrant children. The stakes are too high to remain uninformed.

If you would like to know where to start, here are resources I recommend.

Raising A Family Overseas book — offers practical advice and real-life insights to help families thrive while living abroad with concrete tools on travel, education, community, transitions, and family connection.
Raising Up a Generation of Healthy Third Culture Kids book — explores the benefits and challenges of a globally mobile life.
Pieces of Purple: The Greatness, Grit, and Grace of Growing up MK book — explores how TCKs uniquely navigate identity, hardship, and spirituality
Raising Thriving Kids Abroad TCK Training workshop — 3-hour course on supporting TCKs.
Free PCEs Miniseries — learn how to apply PCEs with your family.
Free Family Worksheets for TCKs — designed to build family connection.
Free Safe Space Responses Miniseries — learn how to respond to your TCKs when they’re navigating hardship.
Free TCK Training Podcast — get bite-size content about navigating the TCK experiences.

Footnotes
1 Sengelmann, Peter. Benefits of Living Overseas with Children. Creative Planning International. (September 23, 2024). Accessed 01/29/2025; Shrosbree, Leanne. 10 reasons growing up abroad gives your children a head start in life. Sable International. (June 6, 2019). Accessed 01/29/2025.
2 Nellis, Joe. What does the future hold for Gen Alpha? Cranfield Executive Development. Accessed 01/28/2025; Haidt, Jonathan. End the Phone-Based Childhood Now. The Atlantic. (March 13, 2024). Accessed 01/29/2025.
3 English Standard Version Bible. Bible Gateway. Accessed 02/08/2025.
4 Crossman, T., Wells, L., Vahey Smith, E., & Kanabar, S. (2025, January 20). First Look: Data from the 2024 Survey on the Impact of Childhood Global Mobility on Adult Wellness, 52. Retrieved from https://www.tcktraining.com/research/first-look-data-from-the-2024-survey
5 Ibid., 9.
6 Mandal, Anaya. Not exercising is worse than smoking, diabetes or heart disease finds study. News Medical Life Sciences. (October 21, 2018). Accessed 01/28/2025.
7 Bethell C, Jones J, Gombojav N, Linkenbach J, Sege R. Positive Childhood Experiences and Adult Mental and Relational Health in a Statewide Sample: Associations Across Adverse Childhood Experiences Levels. JAMA Pediatr. (2019):e193007. Accessed 02/01/2025.
8 Pinetree Institute. Positive Childhood Experiences (PCES). Accessed 02/01/2025.
9 Bethell C, Jones J, Gombojav N, Linkenbach J, Sege R. Positive Childhood Experiences. JAMA Pediatr. (2019):e193007. Accessed 02/01/2025.

This article expands on data shared in “Key Takeaways for TCKs” in Mission Frontiers, May/June 2025.

Photo by Mukil Menon, Unsplash.

Do Extroverts Make the Best Missionaries?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do singles make the best missionaries?

Do single extroverts make the best missionaries?

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

Strengths and weaknesses, weaknesses and strengths.

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

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

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

Extroverts, introverts, marrieds, and singles.

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

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

Photo by Pexels on Pixabay

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.

The Harvest is Plentiful and the Workers Won’t Stay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo from Pixabay