Tag: trauma

Present Tense Grace

Editor’s Note: This article discusses a violent attack encountered on the field.

By Breanna Rudolph

I wasn’t ready for it, that beautiful spring evening in 2016 in the mountains of Haiti, when three men burst out of the ditch with a gun and a sword. I also wasn’t ready for what came after: the years of relentless what-ifs and the way fear doesn’t always end when the danger passes. 

Michael and I had only been married a year and a half, and I was five months pregnant with our first child. We had met in Haiti, married, and made our home there in a remote mountain village. We were passionate about the gospel and committed to helping people with medical needs for which there was no local care.

Our lives were full of work and travel. That spring evening, after preparing for a visiting team of surgeons, we stopped in town to grab supper plates before heading up the trail for home in our UTV. We drove to the first mountain crest and stopped to eat where it was cooler. The view was spectacular, overlooking the vast blue ocean and the noisy city below. We remarked that this almost felt like a date, the first we’d really had in months.

We ate quickly; dusk was falling, and we still had an hour left. The trail home stretches about twelve miles over rugged mountain terrain. We continued our journey, and as we rounded a corner, a motorcycle driver stopped and watched us pass. That wasn’t unusual, but I gasped at the evil in his eyes. I almost said something to my husband, but the UTV was loud, and I was too tired to shout.

We forded rivers and climbed ridges and eventually reached the most secluded section of the trail. Recent rains had turned it to deep mud, and our pace slowed to a crawl. As we slogged through the mud, three men shot out of the deep ditch on our left.

Immediately a gun was pressed to my husband’s head. The gunman shouted, slamming the weapon against him. Michael blocked the blows with his hands, trying to reason with the men in Creole.

On my side, two of the men approached. One held a long, dull sword. He prodded me with the blade, then began using his hands. He’s either looking for money, or I’m about to be assaulted, I thought. I shoved him away. His face twisted with rage, and he raised the sword, beating me again and again. Adrenaline is a strange thing; you don’t feel pain until you do. I bent over to shield my belly, letting the blows fall across my shoulder instead. Michael’s back was turned as he fought off his own onslaught of shouting and pistol whipping.

Soon I started to hurt. I grabbed the man’s sword and pulled. He pulled harder. I let go, and he stumbled backward. Now he was even angrier, and he unleashed his weapon on me again. Fearing Michael would rush to save me and be shot, I forced my voice to stay low and calm. “Michael, they’re hurting me.”

Michael managed to get his wallet from his pocket and called them over with an urgent voice, explaining we had only supplies in the back. I suppose they felt their intimidation had done its job. They went over the cab area, took whatever they could find: money, bags, and passports, and vanished.

In the weeks after, the weight of what happened pressed down on us. Each day brought new questions: Will it happen again? Will they come to our home? We learned that these men were part of a small gang camping out in the mountains and that the motorcycle driver I had seen likely tipped them off. 

Perhaps the worst part of it all was my mind constantly playing out darker versions of what could have been. My husband could have been shot. I could have been stabbed, and my baby might not have made it. Were these fears close to reality? Maybe. I felt there was no way I could handle even one of those scenarios.

Over the next few years, the stress moved from the trail to our doorstep. While we were away, a thief broke into our home and went through everything. While home alone with our two young kids, a thief came again, once entering successfully, another time attempting it. Camera footage showed a masked man, later found watching our house with a machete hidden in his pants.

While driving to visit friends, unruly kids threw a rock at us from the embankment above the road. It struck the roll bar on the UTV with such force that it shattered — inches from our son’s head. Events like these fed my growing fears, sending my mind spinning through what could have been. I was hyper-vigilant and always on edge, checking and rechecking my surroundings. 

The breaking point came in 2021 during what was supposed to be a five-week furlough in the States. Our missionary friend was killed in a plane crash. He’d been flying over the southern mountains we all crossed to avoid the gang-controlled roads. I watched his widow handle this unimaginable loss with such grace and fell apart.

This could happen to us too, and I was certain I didn’t have her level of strength to endure it. Days after that, the Haitian president was assassinated, and Haiti descended into anarchy. What was meant to be a brief furlough became an indefinite return for our family. 

In the safety of the States, the tension in my mind finally began to ease. I started to recognize just how deeply fear had settled into my body and thoughts. What I would later understand was post-traumatic stress had mushroomed into anxiety and insomnia.

In missionary circles, the language of sacrifice is well known; wholeness of mind, body, and spirit is not. People asked about our work, but rarely about how we were really, truly doing. I felt pressure to remain the “heroic” version of ourselves, a projection of the unshakable missionaries portrayed in the biographies they admired.

It’s easier for most people to sanitize a story from a distance than to sit in the dusty disappointments of its reality. I remember some of the most confident “faith over fear” advice from individuals whose homes were wrapped in security systems, where an alarm would bring the police in minutes. Though they had the best intentions, and by no fault of their own, this exposed a seemingly vast disconnect.

In those moments, theology offered without empathy felt cold, and I instinctively pulled away. I had no words for what I was facing, and even less understanding of how to bring it before God without feeling like an ashamed imposter who was failing at faith.

Only gradually did I come to understand that I had never brought my pain and worry into the light of God’s truth. I had been trying to build a life in the gap between them, keeping my suffering and faith separate. In doing so, I had overlooked something so simple: God does not give imaginary grace for imaginary things.

I realized I was putting myself through ‘simulated suffering,’ trying to summon the strength to survive a murder, a plane crash, or a loss that hadn’t happened. I felt weak because I was trying to carry a burden God had neither placed on my shoulders nor given me strength to bear.

I think this is more common than we admit — many of us do this with finances, health, politics, and relationships. We rehearse disasters that haven’t even happened to steel ourselves against losses we haven’t actually faced. As a thinker and organized planner, some of my greatest giftings and strengths became weaknesses when driven by fear and worry. 

Trusting God’s sovereignty over what does not happen takes a different kind of discipline. It requires believing that, despite our vivid imaginations, He remains the gatekeeper of our lives. The Lord governs over all that comes to pass and shields us from the countless tragedies that do not. I had somewhat viewed God’s sovereignty as passive, as if He simply stepped back and let Haiti’s chaos engulf us and our friends. But even the boundaries around our suffering are as much under His control as the circumstances He allowed, just as God set limits that Satan could not cross in Job’s life.

As we pray about whether God will lead us back to Haiti, I still struggle. Part of working through that has been writing this. I am reminded of “bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). This isn’t a passive “letting go”; it is an aggressive arrest of the mind. Obedience often leads straight through our deepest wounds and fears.

When my mind begins to unravel, I now ask: Has God given me grace for this yet? The answer is always no, of course not, because it hasn’t happened. And that “no” is a gift. It turns my heart from worry toward deep thankfulness.

Perhaps God will one day lead our family through what I fear the most. I may wonder if I have the faith for that journey, but I now understand that burden is not mine to bear — it belongs to God. The unknown ahead isn’t a dark void, it is territory already claimed by the light of His presence.

While I don’t yet have the grace for tomorrow, I do have exactly enough for this breath, this prayer, this step. And maybe, if you are walking through fear or uncertainty too, this can serve as the reminder we both need: His grace is enough for the road we are actually on. 

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Breanna Rudolph is the wife of Michael and a mother of three. After serving in Haiti for over seven years, their family now lives in Tennessee, seeking to be faithful where God has them while waiting on His next steps. Her writing can be found at thinkingwithtruth.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The good stuff doesn’t weigh us down. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staying in Ministry After Spiritual Trauma

By Anonymous

Once upon a time I thought of the church as “the dearest place on earth.” It was where I felt safest, where I belonged, where I thought I was known and loved unconditionally. It was my happy place for decades – as a child, teenager, young adult. The idea of spending the rest of my life serving Christ among God’s people was beautiful and compelling. It was all I’d ever wanted. 

As a teen I served any chance I could, and when I was sixteen, I sensed the Spirit calling me to make Christ known wherever I was. I strongly felt called to ministry in the church, and I knew that for the rest of my life in one form or another, that is what I would do. 

I have been in ministry for about twenty-five years now. I have served in many ways – in discipleship ministries, outreach, children’s ministry, church planting, and overseas gospel work. And while loving the Church has brought me some of my deepest joys and seasons when I have felt more alive than ever, I have also been harmed by it. I know these days the word “trauma” gets thrown around a lot, but I am not using it lightly when I say that I have quite a bit of spiritual trauma that I am now also moving through and healing from. 

I am not sure the details of the story matter here. Maybe it is enough to say that the church I once thought was the dearest place on earth, I came to realize was only safe as long as I stayed within a certain narrative and version of reality. 

The narrative I had built my life on crumbled in my late 30s and early 40s. I thought I was known there but came to see that to “thrive” in that environment, I wasn’t allowed to feel the pain of the harm and dysfunction I grew up in. The people who should have protected me as a child and young adult didn’t. Some actively harmed me in the name and with the authority of “God.” Others weren’t able to care well for me in the places of my deepest pain and harm.

I have come to understand in the last five years the amount of spiritual oppression I was under for decades and how living in low-trust, high-control spiritual environments shaped my view of God and my view of self.  

From very early on, my conscience was bound to very oppressive ways to honor God. So even though I didn’t feel safe, my autonomy and sense of agency were bypassed, and my conscience was forced to submit to toxic authority. My young mind learned that I couldn’t trust my perception of reality, only the interpretation of reality that my spiritual authority had. That message has stayed with me for a very long time.

As an adult, I have experienced leadership as not owning their part of the harm, as not being interested in how it impacted me. If I was going to stay in good relationship with church leadership, I couldn’t face my own experience in that environment because somehow it was a form of betrayal – and of lack of submission to the sovereignty of God who placed me under said authority. 

When I started to face my experience and my story, I couldn’t experience God as being for me in my suffering, because if I accepted that my suffering came because of those in spiritual authority over me (who were also family or as close as family), then how were they also representatives of God? Subconsciously I thought then that the Lord must be my oppressor. 

I have at times experienced intense post-traumatic stress symptoms when I seek his nearness in the Word. How can I experience the nearness of God in his Word when that same Word was wielded as a weapon to me? Dissociation sometimes kicks in more brutally as a result in those very moments of seeking him. 

As I have recognized spiritual trauma in my soul, I have wrestled with the question, can I stay in ministry and heal? Or even honestly, can I stay in church period and heal? 

And while I know the answer to this question will vary from person to person and story to story, I want to share with you how I am moving through this question and how I am both still in ministry and healing. 

To be clear, though, the main issue has never been whether to stay in ministry. The key question after spiritual trauma has been, who is the real and true Christ? And then, what does it mean for me to follow him? 

All I can say is that Christ has been my champion. He is the one who started leading me down a path I would have never chosen on my own, to open my eyes to the harm I had experienced and to the ways I was trapped and enslaved. He has kindly and relentlessly shown me a different life than the one I thought was from him and for him. 

So how has he done that? How has he cared for me and held me through the most tumultuous years of my soul? When I reflect on his goodness, I see four main ways.

He has provided the safety to help me see the shackles I lived with. 

In ways I would have never architectured myself, the Lord allowed me to taste and see many things that were wrong, dysfunctional, harmful, and hurtful. While I would have never chosen to walk through some really tough church situations or to experience in my own body the intensity of post-traumatic stress responses, the Lord used these things to help me see that “Something is not as it should be. Something harmful happened to me early on that is being triggered in a similar situation.” It moved me to ask questions and to face my story honestly. 

Christ had worked for over a decade to get me to a place of knowing deep safety with the Father so that when the time came to explore my story, I was deeply grounded and rooted in the safety of God. With Christ’s strength, and hidden inside him, I was able to face the scariest parts, the things I had blocked out, dissociated from, and pushed really deep down. 

He also provided safe people to help as I processed my story. They were more removed from the situation and hadn’t been affected in the same way, so they helped me see the harm. They could discern better than I could that “This isn’t right. That was high abuse. This shouldn’t have happened to you.” These safe people help me contrast between healthy and unhealthy leadership. 

He is giving me courage to name what I need and to pursue it. 

When your nervous system has learned that “safe” means not naming reality or what you need in light of your experience, it is incredibly terrifying to say, “This is what I need.” But in the goodness and kindness of Christ, because of the work he has done in extricating me from harmful and unsafe community, I am able to safely recognize, “I need clinical/trauma counseling. I need to be removed from this situation. I am not able to continue these relationships. My brain needs to heal.”

He has provided the care — physical, mental, spiritual, emotional — that I need. 

He opened the way for us to leave an oppressive church. Safety is key for the brain to heal, and I am so grateful He provided really safe church leadership to transition to when we left. He provided clinical counselors that have walked with me for close to four years and the insurance to pay for EMDR for a time.

Overseas he surrounded me with Christians who were very different from the ones I grew up with and who introduced me to ways of connecting and communing with him that didn’t trigger my fight-or-flight response. Some of those Christians were more emotionally healthy than anyone I had ever seen, giving me a vision of the kind of freedom that was possible for me as a daughter of God. 

His spirit gripped me with the conviction that if sound doctrine (or healthy beliefs) leads to healthy living (the whole point of the letter to Titus), then the unhealthy fruit I was seeing wasn’t coming from God himself but from unhealthy beliefs. In other words, he showed me more of who he really is so that I could differentiate unhealthy, toxic, oppressive leadership from God himself. 

He himself has been my healer, my salvation.

If so much of the harm was spiritual, unseen, I needed the triune unseen God to personally care for me — his spirit tending my spirit. He gave me friends who shared the deep conviction that the presence of Christ himself could heal my broken, trapped spirit and that I needed sights of my Savior more than anything else. Their experience with listening prayer and Immanuel prayer was a gift to me to experience the tending of Christ. 

I have also spent so much time in the gospels getting to know the true Christ, the one who lived, suffered, died, and rose again for me, and who did all that in union with me. Slowing down, I have watched him, using my senses to be in the story with him, listening to his tone of voice, paying attention to his categories, contrasting him with the Christ I thought was the true Christ. This all helped me consciously differentiate him from harmful spiritual authority in my life. Getting to know my Shepherd grew my confidence that I really do hear his voice and that he knows me. 

The truth is that getting to know this beautiful true Christ has only fueled my heart’s fire to not only know him more but also to create spaces for others to show up with their whole selves and experience his deep tending. His healing hand has not only tenderly loved me and cared for me personally and specifically but also replenished the spring of water within me that overflows and moves toward others so that together we can taste and see how good he is. 

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Staying in ministry means that I am still working in the church and that church still feels a bit like a minefield. I am especially still learning what it means to trust my pastors. It is easy for me to live in the old story that trauma wired deep in my body and expect not only that they will fail me and harm me (because in this fallen world that is bound to happen) but that they will not own the harm. I half expect them to be sneaky, to withhold information, to not mean what they say, to have a hidden agenda (even if not intentionally), and to use their spiritual authority to take away my sense of agency and autonomy. 

I am in the thick of growing discernment muscles, learning to live in a new story — one where pastors are emotionally mature and don’t treat you like a child, one where they know how to stay in their lane. Yet even though I am a work in progress, and I am not naive about the people of God, the mysterious beauty of Christ still compels me. He is the dearest Person on earth, my life and my home in this world. 

He compels me to entrust my whole being, my whole journey, my whole life and calling to him. I have tasted him to truly be a refuge for the helpless. He keeps calling me daughter, he keeps taking away my shame, he keeps freeing me, he keeps telling me, “Go and tell and embody all that I am so others too can also taste my goodness.” And so I am.

What Missionary Kids See on the Field Part 2: Support that Lessens the Impact of Witnessed Trauma

In my previous post (What Missionary Kids See on the Field Part 1: The Impact of Witnessed Trauma), I shared data from TCK Training’s latest white paper (Sources of Trauma in International Childhoods) along with wisdom from many A Life Overseas authors. As we sifted through information on what can be a difficult topic, we kept in mind these two key points:

  1. We are not comparing the experiences of missionary kids to a theoretical ‘perfect’ childhood they could have had elsewhere.
  1. Not every potentially traumatic event is experienced as trauma by each individual.

This means that often there is no clear ‘right’ answer; different people (different families, different children) will need different things. Setting blanket rules is unlikely to address every situation. Instead, we are going to talk about principles.

My last post included four suggestions for ways we can support families, and in this post I will expand these ideas with practical tips and more wisdom from the ALO team. 

  1. Protect children where possible.
  2. Fight the normalisation of trauma.
  3. Provide support to both parents and children.
  4. Continue support after they leave the field.

Protect children where possible

Knowing that witnessing potentially traumatic events is linked to increased risk should cause us to think carefully about taking our children to places where this can occur.

Part of determining field suitability should include a careful assessment of the level of trauma, including witnessed trauma, likely to occur in the location. If the risk is high, additional supports should be in place. If traumatic events end up happening frequently, a change of location may be warranted. 

How do we make these momentous decisions? Anna Hampton’s thoughts on Risk and the Cross Cultural Worker are so helpful here: “A theology of suffering asks a different question than a theology of risk asks. When I was a young mom facing daily threats of all kinds but especially kidnapping and murder, I needed to be able to evaluate what God was calling me and my children to that day. We hadn’t suffered the reality of kidnapping, but we were facing the risk of it. So how was I to think, to process my emotions, hear God’s voice, and then make a decision on what I was to do?” 

A lot in life cannot be predicted, including how individuals will react to and cope with potentially traumatic events. Flexibility and a willingness to change plans is important – in life generally, but especially in high risk areas. Sometimes a location changes from low risk to high risk very suddenly. Sometimes a single event changes how individuals within a family feel about their emotional and/or physical safety. 

Being willing to sacrifice our plans in order to protect children is crucial. If we sacrifice children in order to continue the plans we had made, there is something wrong with our priorities.

I love how Kay Bruner writes about this in Ask A Counselor: No Child Soldiers, No Child Sacrifice: “We are not called to deliberately – or carelessly – traumatize our children for God’s sake. When traumatic events occur, we should be the first ones at our child’s side bringing care, concern, and healing…Please don’t take your children into active danger, thinking that this will somehow make you a better kind of Christian.” 

Fight the normalisation of trauma

Just because something happens regularly does not mean it is normal. When potentially traumatic events happen regularly, we must actively fight against them being seen as ‘normal.’

Whatever happens regularly during your childhood becomes your normal. Children can adapt to anything – including, sadly, horrible abuse and devastating traumas. Believing these events are ‘normal’ does not, however, stop them from affecting a child’s psyche. This means that in order to process the impact of the abuse and/or trauma they have suffered, an individual must first recognise that what they went through was not normal. 

Many missionary kids normalise abusive and/or traumatic events they experience during childhood – to the point of not mentioning them to adults in their lives, including their parents. This is something we see over and over again at TCK Training, when Adult TCKs dismiss dramatic events and inappropriate behaviour from others as potential sources of trauma because “that was normal where I grew up” or “that happened to everyone.”

Adults in their lives unwittingly contribute to this every time we downplay things that make children feel uncomfortable or unsafe. In addition, while phrases like “Don’t worry, this is normal here” or “You’ll get used to it after a while” may be intended to comfort, they instead teach children to ignore their feelings because what is common is normal. We think that by putting on a happy face, we can make a scary situation okay, but we’re wrong. 

Anna Glenn writes about the problem of pasting a smile over pain in Toxic Positivity in Missions: “Toxic positivity is a reaction that stems from fear and shame rather than faith. It focuses on self-reliance to ‘power through’ and create or shine our own light rather than calling us to step into the light through surrender to the one true God. Toxic positivity is a shallow substitute for the hope of the gospel and a genuine relationship with Christ.” 

Instead, we all need to be brave enough to sit with difficult emotions and to sit with children and young people experiencing difficult emotions. We need to call out the wrongness in our world, even when it happens frequently around us. We need to acknowledge that witnessing potentially traumatic events is evidence of the brokenness of this world – not something to dismiss, but something to mourn. It is something that impacts us, and even the smallest child, on a soul level – because the world should not be this way. 

“We need to recognize these stressful events as threats to the mental health and stability of international families. When we recognize them as such, we can mobilize to acknowledge and debrief these events.” – Sources of Trauma in International Childhoods

Provide support to both parents and children

We need to think about the entire family unit. Children do not live in isolation, but with parents and caregivers who live in the same environments and therefore are likely witnessing the same or similar potentially traumatic events. They may even have witnessed more events from which they have sheltered their children.

Just because parents are adults does not make them immune to the impact of witnessing traumatic events. On the contrary – the impact of traumatic events flows through them to their children. The whole family needs support when living in environments where traffic accidents and violence are occuring. 

“The stress of bearing witness to trauma is easily brought into the home, impacting family dynamics and parent-child connectedness.”  – Sources of Trauma in International Childhoods

Parents need support to process what they have witnessed so that they can be emotionally available to support their children. Unfortunately, in many cases these occurrences are normalised, and families do not feel they are ‘allowed’ to need or want help to work through witnessing events that happen regularly. Yet regular debriefing (and crisis debriefing when a significant event takes place) should be a key part of how families are cared for to ensure long-term health and thriving for each person. 

When these potentially traumatic events are ignored and families do not receive adequate support, the impacts do not go away over time – they fester. As Abigail Follows writes in The Myth of the Ideal Childhood, “We can think of a trauma as a ‘heart wound’ – a wound that needs tending, otherwise it will get infected – a wound that can heal with the right treatment.”

In addition to targeted support, supportive communities that surround families in these situations are incredibly powerful. As I wrote recently in It takes a village – including for missionary families, “The communities supporting families living abroad are essential to these families’ long-term thriving. If we want to see missionary kids thrive long term, we need more than good parenting advice; we need to be the community these families need.” 

When potentially traumatic events occur regularly, when missionaries and their children see these soul-injuring sights in the course of their daily lives, it takes a toll. Anna Glenn writes poignantly on this in The Untold Stories of Returned Missionaries:

“For many missionaries who are serving in underdeveloped nations where hunger, disease, and violence run rampant, the horrors that they have witnessed day in and day out may have grown to be too much. We all know that death and pain are a part of life, but when you see people, people you know and love, dying from easily preventable causes nearly every single week and you see bodies on the side of the road mangled to the point of being unrecognizable, your psyche is forever impacted and sometimes there are just no words.”

Given that these words were written in the content of missionaries who have returned to their passport countries from the field, this leads us to our final point:

Continue support after they leave the field

The impact of witnessed trauma doesn’t end when we leave the environment in which it occurred. Unfortunately, upon leaving the field many missionary families lose the supportive community who understood those experiences. Taking care to support missionary families through the lens of accumulated trauma can make a big difference.

This means acknowledging that what feels safe/unsafe may be different for them – especially for children who grew up in a different environment – and that what triggers unsafe feelings may be different. 

Often this includes exposure to media coverage of other countries, including but not limited to countries where the family lived previously. Lilly Rivera brings up an important point in Reading the News When Crisis Hits: “Reading the news can be a triggering experience if you have gone through traumatic experiences yourself. The injustice, violence, and pain can make you feel paralyzed, angry or really upset.” 

I also appreciate this perspective from adult MK Aneurin Howorth in Devastating Secrets of Living Abroad: “The trauma we carry around as TCKs usually manifests itself through mental illnesses once we are adults. The counselor Lois Bushong says that most TCKs tend to only start going to counseling once they are in their 30’s. I am not yet in my thirties, but already, increasing numbers of my classmates report having mental health issues, almost exclusively struggling from unresolved trauma or grief on the mission field. Being a TCK does not stop when we become adults; both the blessings and the curses will follow us forever.” 

The impact of witnessed trauma does not always manifest immediately; sometimes it is a slow burn, which is why long-term care and support is important. It is also why TCK Training is running research on both the good and hard experiences TCKs had during childhood, as well as their strengths and struggles as adults – we want to know more about the links between these so that we can better support TCKs as they grow. (Learn more about the survey here).

 

Resources referenced:

Risk and the Cross Cultural Worker

Ask A Counselor: No Child Soldiers, No Child Sacrifice

Toxic Positivity in Missions

Sources of Trauma in International Childhoods (TCK Training)

Debriefing Resources (TCK Training)

The Myth of the Ideal Childhood

It takes a village – including for missionary families

The Untold Stories of Returned Missionaries

Reading the News When Crisis Hits

Devastating Secrets of Living Abroad

Impact of Childhood Global Mobility on Adult Wellness (TCK Training Survey)

Photo by Transly Translation Agency on Unsplash

What Missionary Kids See on the Field Part 1: The Impact of Witnessed Trauma

Trauma. What does this word make you think of? Does it worry you, even scare you? Does it bring to mind certain events from your own life? Have you seen it used so often that it’s beginning to lose meaning for you? 

I found the definition of trauma Shonna Ingram shared in her post The Unseen Trauma of the Mission Field: What Trauma Is and What It Does very helpful:

“Trauma results from any event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life-threatening and that has lasting negative effects on a person’s mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.”

Over the years, A Life Overseas has not shied away from difficult topics – including trauma on the mission field and how it impacts missionaries and their children. Together we have written about how to understand trauma and heal from it; specific experiences of trauma and how to process them; the long-term impact of trauma on the field, including on mental health; theology of risk; toxic positivity; moral injury; and more. I have also shared research insights from my work with TCK Training, looking at the experiences of missionary kids and their families over time.

Today I come with new data from TCK Training’s latest white paper (Sources of Trauma in International Childhoods) together with the collected wisdom of A Life Overseas’ authors. I’ll discuss data on potentially traumatic events witnessed by TCKs and reference excellent articles from the A Life Overseas (ALO) library. I’ll list these resources at the end.

Why do we need to talk about trauma?

In TCK Training’s research, which involved over 1,000 missionary kids (MKs), exposure to potentially traumatic events was one of two key risk factors linked to high ACE scores. High ACE scores in turn are linked with increased risk of a range of negative outcomes in adulthood. (The other key risk factor was high mobility, which I wrote about in Mobility is tough on kids: here’s how you can help.)

It’s important to start by recognizing that trauma can, and does, happen everywhere all over the world. Staying in your passport country does not make you immune to trauma, and leaving for the mission field does not guarantee a traumatic outcome. Abigail Follows explained this nicely in The Myth of the Ideal Childhood, where she wrote that “disasters, traumas, and crises happen. They happen everywhere.”

In addition, there is a difference between potential trauma and actual trauma. Witnessing a potentially traumatic event does not mean an individual will necessarily experience it as traumatic.

As Kay Bruner wrote in Ask A Counselor: How Do We Recognize and Cope with Trauma, “The perception that we are helpless in the face of frightening events is one of the foundational pieces of psychological trauma. This helps us understand why some members of a family may be minimally impacted by an event, while others are deeply traumatized.” 

In fact, lack of control means that sometimes children feel a deeper sense of trauma from an event than an adult might in that situation. In other cases, not understanding the full impact of what is happening might mean a child is less impacted. The important point is that we cannot know how each individual will respond, so assumptions are unhelpful.

As we start to look at some difficult numbers together, let’s keep in mind these two pieces of wisdom:

  1. We are not comparing the experiences of missionary kids to a theoretical ‘perfect’ childhood they could have had elsewhere.
  1. Not every potentially traumatic event is experienced as trauma by each individual.

Witnessing Potentially Traumatic Events

The 1,904 ATCKs who took our survey were asked both if they had witnessed a certain type of event at all, and if they had witnessed this ‘regularly.’ The events we asked about included:

  • Extreme poverty
  • Serious traffic accident
  • Armed conflict
  • Traumatic death (human)
  • Traumatic death (animal)
  • Physical violence

86% of missionary kids witnessed at least one of these potentially traumatic events; more than half of missionary kids witnessed potentially traumatic events regularly (53%).

Extreme Poverty

77% of missionary kids reported they had witnessed extreme poverty at least once, and 61% said they witnessed this regularly. Living among those experiencing extreme poverty and knowing you cannot fix it can lead to what Rachel Pieh Jones labelled ‘moral injury.’

In her article on the topic, she writes: “All my high ideals and righteous ambitions lie in tatters at my feet while people around me go hungry and I can never feed them all. When injustice reigns and I don’t protest. When racism rules and I benefit. And that’s just what I’m willing to publicly confess.”

Witnessing extreme poverty was the only item on the above list not linked to higher-than-average risk. That is, MKs who only witnessed extreme poverty (18% of the group) had an ACE risk similar to that seen in the general TCK population.

Serious Traffic Accident

In some countries traffic accidents are more common, and where cars regularly share badly maintained roads with motorcycles (and helmets are not worn), accidents can be particularly traumatic to witness. As Anna Glenn writes in The Untold Stories of Returned Missionaries, “[When] you see bodies on the side of the road mangled to the point of being unrecognizable, your psyche is forever impacted and sometimes there are just no words.” 

Three out of every five missionary kids (40%) had witnessed a serious traffic accident by age 18. Nearly a quarter of those (9% of all missionary kids) witnessed serious accidents regularly. 

When originally crafting this survey, we made sure to ask about serious traffic accidents because we’ve seen the impact of ongoing struggles related to witnessed accidents, even when TCKs were not directly involved in the accident themselves. A variety of reactions, including fear, anxiety, nightmares, reluctance to drive/learn to drive, and PTSD, can be involved. 

Witnessing Violence

More than half of missionary kids (59%) witnessed one of the final four types of potentially traumatic events we listed: 

  1. armed conflict
  2. human death
  3. traumatic animal death
  4. physical violence

For the purpose of our survey, we defined armed conflict as “two groups fighting with weapons.” We found that 20% of missionary kids had witnessed armed conflict.

One quarter of missionary kids had witnessed the traumatic death of a person (24%), including 4% who witnessed a murder. They had the same increased ACE risk as those who witnessed armed conflict (28% of the group had high-risk ACE scores). The risk was higher again for MKs who regularly witnessed any kind of human death, with one third of this group having a high ACE score (33%), nearly double the rate for MKs overall. 

In our work with adult TCKs, we have often found that animal death comes up as an event requiring debriefing as it had not been processed effectively at the time it occurred. More than one third of missionary kids (35%) reported witnessing the traumatic death of an animal. Witnessing animal death came with an increased ACE risk, especially when it happened regularly. The risk associated with regularly witnessing traumatic animal death was the same as the risk associated with regularly witnessing human death.

What do we do about this?

Based on the research around trauma, including the data we have on what MKs are experiencing, I have four suggestions about what we should do next. In my next article, I expand on these four ideas with practical suggestions and more quotes from the ALO library: 

  1. Protect children where possible.
  2. Fight the normalisation of trauma.
  3. Provide support to both parents and children.
  4. Continue support after they leave the field.

The Good News

Not all TCKs, and not all missionary kids, witnessed these types of potentially traumatic events. When we review the data on those who were not exposed, we find some wonderful news!

Looking at the missionary kids who did not regularly witness traumatic events, only 9% had a high Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) score (4 or more out of 10), compared to 12.5% of Americans and 17% of MKs overall.

Looking then at missionary kids who did not witness ANY potentially traumatic events, only 6% of recorded 4 or more ACEs – lower than seen in any study we could find in any country using the same question framing.

This is really good news. It suggests that when MKs grow up in environments where they are not witnessing these types of potentially traumatic events, their families are healthier overall. 

Read part two: What Missionary Kids See on the Field Part 2: Support that Lessens the Impact of Witnessed Trauma

Resources referenced:

The Unseen Trauma of the Mission Field: What Trauma Is and What It Does

Sources of Trauma in International Childhoods (TCK Training)

Mobility is tough on kids: here’s how you can help

The Myth of the Ideal Childhood

Ask A Counselor: How Do We Recognize and Cope with Trauma

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) (TCK Training)

Moral Injury

The Untold Stories of Returned Missionaries

Photo by Nimrod Persson on Unsplash

 

I’d like a refund for this cup of suffering

by Elizabeth Vahey Smith

“It’s not fair,” I whined in the backseat of the car, my sister next to me.
“It’s not fair,” I moped from the end of the line.
“It’s not fair,” I mourned, overlooked for a role I wanted.
“It’s not fair,” I gasped, taking the fall.
“It’s not fair,” I wailed, watching everything I’d built fall apart.

“But look at what God is doing through this,” they point.
“It’s not fair,” I say again.

I think it’s just awful that wonderful things come out of terrible things. I hate that you have to bury seeds for them to bloom. I hate that pearls come from irritants. I hate that delicious strawberries come from fields fertilized in manure. And I hate all of those things because I hate that post-traumatic wisdom only comes from going through tragedies.

Yeah, I guess if you have to go through hard things, it’s nice that something good can come from it. But why do we have to go through hard things to have the good things that come after?

I can point to the traumas and tragedies that have brought me to a place of being able to weave words into stories that present hard truths in soft ways. I cherish the times people tell me how these words altered the trajectory of their homes in ways that brought them closer to the unconditional love of the Father. But surely there is another way to learn this wisdom and pass it on?

Everything is possible for you, Father.
Take this cup of suffering from me.

And thus begins a sacred journey.

We all know that life’s not fair, but it makes it a bit easier to not have to go it alone. To know that the Lord has gone before us even in this. To know that the journey through unfair trauma and tragedy can take us to glorious destinations. To know that we have a comforter, a counselor, and a light to guide our path. 

I have a journey before me, but I’m standing at the front desk with a complaint, “Excuse me, sir, I specifically asked that this cup would be taken from me. And yet, behold, still there is a cup. I would like this to be rectified.” And Jesus comes alongside me to guide me. “Yet not what I will, but what you will,” He coaches me.

“I’m sorry, what?!” I’m doing double-takes as Jesus leads me forward on the journey. I am a reluctant follower. But I follow, nonetheless, and I see how the path I walk is neither new nor novel but a well-worn road.

My soul has been overwhelmed with sorrow.
I have felt betrayed.
I have stood silent against accusations.
I’ve had friends abandon me.
I’ve experienced pain.
I’ve had tragedy happen.
I’ve survived it.

But it’s interesting, isn’t it? That’s not the end. The story, the journey, it isn’t over yet. Jesus isn’t yet at the right hand of God, and I have no wisdom to offer anyone yet.

It seems that after the death of Christ, we stop focusing on his humanity. We talk extensively about the agony of the cross, which makes sense because all four of the Gospel writers draw us into this tragedy. The curtain is torn. Darkness falls. And the focus shifts from Jesus to the perspective of those left behind. That makes sense for the Gospels. What was Jesus doing at this point? We hear about the work of Jesus conquering Death in the epistles, but his followers didn’t know these things.

Even on Easter morning, the focus doesn’t shift back to Jesus. We continue to follow the story of the women and the disciples. Jesus just appears and disappears until he finally ascends. That’s how the authors wrote their gospels, so it makes sense that we would follow along that way. 

We receive so many emotion words from the women and the disciples. I can imagine Luke interviewing people and hearing from their perspective, “We were so frightened; we thought he was a ghost. Even when we saw he wasn’t a ghost, we still couldn’t believe it. We were amazed and overjoyed” (Luke 24:37-41). How was Jesus feeling during this? The eye-witnesses were too gobsmacked to notice and give account. 

Thus, the sacred journey continues. 

My eyes fixed on Jesus; I see how my journey overlays His.
I’m aching and weary.
The moment of trauma is over, yet my body is still on high alert.
My skin feels electrified. Every brush of my own clothes sears my skin.
I feel like my back’s been flayed.
And I look toward Jesus.
I don’t know how his back is doing, but the wounds of his hands and his side are still gaping.
Honestly, it’s a miracle he’s even alive.

We each come across a couple of our friends, but they don’t recognize us.
Our friends recount our own story to us, but they totally miss the point.
I’m furious and think, “How foolish you are!” (Luke 24:25)
I explain to my friends, and He explains to His, in a way that they don’t miss the point.
And then Jesus walks away.
 
“No, no, no,” I call him back. “These are our friends, our people.”
I’m clinging to what I know.
He keeps walking until his friends urge him to stay, even though they still don’t recognize him.
It’s like he wants me to be willing to walk away from people I’ve grown away from.
I’m not ready for this lesson.

When he comes back, I’m glad.
I watch them eat together.
In the common monotony of everyday life, his friends finally recognize him.
But it’s only two people.

It happens again.
Different people. More cherished friends.
They don’t understand what’s happened either.
“You’ve changed,” they tell me.
“Why are you troubled? Look at me. It’s me!” I implore them.
My words echo His, as Jesus tries to convince his friends he’s not a ghost.
They believe: we’re each still who we are.
Now what?

“Do you have anything to eat?” Jesus asks.
He invites us back into the common monotony of everyday life.
We eat, we talk, we tell the story again.
It’s hard to tell every time.

The hardest part is reconciliation, so I hang back and watch.
Jesus comes to Peter.
Peter recognizes him and dives off the boat to greet him. Classic Peter.
Jesus invites them to eat.
I take notes. Always start with food. It brings people together.
Three times, Jesus asks Peter if he loves Him.
I’m thankful for this interchange.
I don’t have to be content with one apology and be expected to get over it.
I can request reassurances in proportion with the damage rendered.

Finally comes the conclusion.
Finally comes the ascension.
Finally the journey ends. 

Trauma is like any other story. It’s got a setting and rising action before the conflict and climax. And it ends with cleaning up all the leftover messes. Often the leftover messes of a trauma are the relationships: reconnecting, repairing, reconciling, and settling back into normal rhythms. This is a hard part of trauma that is often overlooked. Many times this hard part takes a lot longer than we expect. 

In this time following Resurrection Sunday and leading up to Ascension Sunday, we hold sacred the long journey through trauma and tragedy to the good that God has in store for us: the wisdom that these experiences give us. And as much as I cherish that wisdom and the goodness God has for us through the hard things, I’m going to stay mad about the awfulness of how this broken world functions. I can do both. 

I refuse to get over how awful it is that good things come from hard things. 

I will hold this space for those of you still in the early stages of your journey, for those of you banging your fists on the front desk, demanding a refund for this cup of suffering, insisting that it’s not fair. I’m here to say, “You’re right! It’s not fair! And most importantly! You’re not alone.” 

For those of you further along who are activated and who feel disconnected from their communities, who wonder why it had to happen like this, who wonder why it’s not getting easier in the wake of tragedy, I’m here to say, “You’re right! It’s not fair! And most importantly! You’re not alone.” 

For those of you who have seen the beautiful things that the Lord has wrought out of the awful things you’ve lived through, who are turning back and grieving for themselves that they ever had to endure that, I’m here to say, “You’re right! It’s not fair! And most importantly! You’re not alone.”

And I can point out to you the Way, the Truth, and the Life. He walked with me through the valley of the shadow of death, and He will walk with you.

It seems agonizingly unfair that much of wisdom, strength, and personal growth comes from difficult and painful journeys. Not just the hardship, but the recovery, coming back to people and them not recognizing you, being met with doubt, and having to convince people of the journey you’ve been on. 

In this season, we remember the sacredness of this journey, a trauma-versary that changed the world forever. The Lord has gone before us. But moreover, he goes alongside us, today, at whatever stage of the journey we’re in. 

Trauma doesn’t make us stronger, but continuing onward through the hard things toward healing does. 

And I hate that for us. 

~~~~~~~~~~

Elizabeth Vahey Smith is a TCK mom who spent 5 years in Papua New Guinea as a missionary. Now her family explores the globe full-time as worldschoolers. Elizabeth works remotely as the COO for TCK Training, traveling often for work and always for pleasure. She is the author of The Practice of Processing: Exploring Your Emotions to Chart an Intentional Course. Follow her travels on Instagram @elizabeth.vaheysmith and @neverendingfieldtrip. Learn more about research-based preventive care for TCKs @tcktraining.

Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash

How to Start Healing From Trauma: The Unseen Trauma of the Mission Field Part 3

by Shonna Ingram

In part one of this series on trauma, I explained what trauma is and what it does to us. In part two, I told you about James’s story. As we think about his story, we notice that he is not in this situation because of one big, traumatic event. Instead, it was small experiences that piled on top of each other that he wasn’t able to process (although there were some big ones in there too).

James was stuck, and he knew it. When people like James come to me for help, I don’t tell them to “just pray about it.” They’ve often heard advice like that before, and it usually isn’t helpful. Instead, I take people on a recovery journey. This journey is not linear, but rather an opportunity to reflect, create, and grow in an ongoing process. 

As I said earlier, there isn’t one single therapy or modality that will heal the layers of trauma we see in this story. On different parts of the trauma recovery journey, James will need different interventions and approaches.

 

Laying the Foundation

We start trauma healing by integrating the brain, heart, and body. To do this, we need an approach that connects mental health principles with a Biblical framework. 

We need an evidence-based approach. The first rule in mental health is to “do no harm.” To help with that, we need researched and proven tools to use throughout the healing journey. But more than that, we need compassion and people to come alongside us in our season of trauma recovery. 

Trauma recovery is not linear. Healing is more of a mending process than a single moment, and we need to think of it as a journey. Some days everything will be fine; other days we will find ourselves triggered for no reason. This is normal, and we need to create space for these ups and downs. With a story like James’s where there isn’t one big event, it’s not always clear what the traumas are. We have to be patient while we figure it out. 

Allow the Holy Spirit to work. We acknowledge that Jesus heals people’s trauma. This isn’t meant to over-spiritualize the process; even secular trauma training holds to the idea that there is something bigger than us out in the universe.

 

Steps for Healing

Before beginning the six steps outlined in this section, it’s important to make sure you are surrounded by people who will support your rebuilding process.

 

1. See where you are. 

If you think you might have experienced a traumatic event, the first step is to get out of the crisis. Think about how the Red Cross or Samaritan’s Purse meets people’s physical needs or about the first level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: water, food, and shelter. Psychological First Aid (PFA) material is a good place to start. (I also recommend the Trauma Healing Institute’s Beyond Disaster material.) 

 

2. Pay attention not only to the things you are saying but also how you are reacting to things.

In the last article I gave examples of some trauma reactions (Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn). You can think through the different types of trauma you may have experienced (Acute, Chronic, Secondary, Childhood Abuse or Abandonment, Moral Injury, Survivor’s Guilt, Loss of Identity, Compound Grief) and ask whether Order, Justice, or Self Value has been lost because of what happened.

 

3. Become familiar with the stages of grief.

Understand the different stages of grief. In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross popularized the five common stages of grief. They include: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.

 

4. Find safe places.

Find someone who will hold your emotional, relational, and situational stories. Safe places should make space for: 

  • Normalizing what is happening. For example, I told James that if I had gone through the same thing he did, I would have felt the same way. 
  • Listening without judgment. 
  • Reflecting back what you are saying. 
  • Discerning with you. This might look like them praying with and for you and bringing your feelings and emotions to Jesus.

 

5. Reach out to a professional counselor, trauma-informed mental health coach, or trauma-informed spiritual director. 

Hopefully you will have a list of vetted mental health professionals that you can reach out to if your needs go beyond what a friend or leader can provide. This is what James needed as part of his recovery from his childhood attachment issues. He went through a series of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) appointments. 

Note: EMDR is one possibility of getting to some of the roots of trauma. Brainspotting (my training), Internal Family Systems (IFS), Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), tapping, and Somatic Therapy (grounding and breathwork) are other methods used in trauma therapy. I have also seen healing through healing prayer sessions with a prayer minister. It depends on the season and what you are most comfortable with. Ask your therapist, coach, or spiritual director what method they use. 

 

6. Lastly, for ongoing recovery to take place, you need to get involved in a trauma-informed community.

When I was studying trauma recovery, I kept coming across the idea of small groups. A small group allows people to share their stories and see that they aren’t alone. That is why Alcoholics Anonymous and Celebrate Recovery programs are so successful. 

I saw a great need for these types of conversations in the missions community and was asked by many of my therapist friends to start something like that. So I created the Renewed Hope Approach, a year-long trauma-informed recovery group that walks people through the three stages of trauma recovery. The groups spend time sharing their pain and talking about common topics like theology of suffering, grief processing, and forgiveness. 

During the pandemic I was able to field test these groups, and I’m happy to announce that they are now open to the public. In these communities we focus on:

Stage 1: Grief, Loss, and Forgiveness (I call this stage Restore.)

Stage 2: Finding Your Renewed Purpose (I call this stage Receive.) 

Stage 3: Growing in Hope (I call this stage Rebuild.)

Each stage connects the brain, heart, and body by telling our story (brain), engaging in expressive therapies like art and prayer (heart), and engaging in body work practices like grounding and breathing exercises (body). The purpose of all these exercises is to reconnect with God, others, and ourselves. These activities, especially in combination, help facilitate our healing.  

 

Wrapping Up James’s Story 

James has come a long way since I first met him a few years ago. Most days he is in Stage 3 (Rebuild). Not every day is perfect, and there are times that he has to go back to Stage 1 (Restore) to spend some time reflecting on another loss or forgiving someone (or himself) for something that happened. But he did start a Master’s in theology and psychology and is looking to help his organization with missionary care. He processed his wounds and decided he wanted to help others, and that is the final stage of trauma recovery: helping others.

 

You are Invited

Maybe your story is as big and complex as James’s story. Or maybe you just need a place to be seen and heard or are interested in taking preventive measures. Maybe you want to process a series of losses or are wondering if you’re dealing with secondary trauma. 

Or perhaps after reading these articles, you find yourself wanting to help others in their season of trauma recovery.

You can find out when the next group or training starts on my website. I would love for you to join us.

My hope for you is that you don’t just take this information and put it on a back shelf. I hope this series will help you see more clearly what is happening within yourself and within the missions community. And I hope you learned that help is available when you need it. 

If you need help discerning your next step, my team and I are only an email or small group away, and we would love to help you on your healing journey. You can check out our groups and trainings at shonnaingram.com. 

 

Additional Resources

EMDR

Brainspotting

IFS Institute

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Among Missionaries 

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Shonna Ingram is the founder and director of the Renewed Hope Approach, a program that provides a practical approach to Post Trauma Care. She’s been in ministry for over 20 years and spent 8 years in Africa as a missionary. Shonna is a Board Certified Master Trauma-Informed Mental Health Coach specializing in career, self-development, and spiritual formation, and she has trained hundreds of people in over 30 countries to integrate mental health into a biblical framework. Her heart for people in the re-entry season led her to create her second series, Your Re-Entry Path, as a way for them to figure out their next season, whether inside or outside of vocational ministry. She is mom to 4 amazing adults.

How Trauma Shows Up on the Field: The Unseen Trauma of the Mission Field Part 2

by Shonna Ingram

This is the second article in a three-part series about the Unseen Trauma of the Mission Field. Today we will explore the way trauma shows up on the mission field.

As I mentioned in Part 1, the first place we notice trauma is in behaviors and reactions. If you do a google search on trauma reaction, you will probably find the three most common responses to trauma: fight, flight, and freeze.

Fight is usually associated with someone who can’t control their anger.

Flight is usually associated with someone who is running. 

Freeze is usually associated with someone going numb. 

However, there are other ways these reactions show up. 

Fight responses can include angry outbursts, controlling behavior, bullying, narcissistic behavior, explosive behavior.

Flight responses can include workaholism, overthinking, anxiety, panic, OCD, difficulty sitting still, perfectionism.

Freeze responses can include feeling stuck, difficulty making decisions, dissociation, isolation. 

Another way trauma can show up is called Fawning. I have especially seen this in the missions community. The fawning response can be exhibited as a people-pleasing reaction. It might also look like a lack of identity, an inability to set boundaries, a feeling of overwhelm, or codependency. 

Note: Unless you are a mental health professional, this list should not be used as a diagnosis for trauma. Instead, you can use it as a guideline to help identify what could be happening inside you. 

To see how these reactions play out, I’ll share a case study. Let me introduce you to James.*  

James grew up attending his local church. His dad worked long hours as a traveling sales person, and his mother stayed at home. He was the oldest of three siblings, the top basketball player at his local high school, and attended all the church youth group events.

However, there was a family secret. James’s mother drank a lot of alcohol. At home during a binge drinking episode, she would chase after her children with a knife threatening to kill them if they didn’t do what she said. When he was only ten years old, she would leave him in charge of his two siblings for days at a time, with no food in the pantry. Since his dad was often traveling for work, the children might go days without food. No one at church knew what was going on because at church the family acted like everything was fine.  

The summer between his sophomore and junior year was the year James finally got to go on the high school missions trip. He wasn’t particularly excited about going; he just wanted to get away from his family for a few weeks that summer. During his time in Central America, God stirred something inside him, and he felt closer to God than ever before. So he told his youth pastor that he wanted to be a missionary. This decision excited people, which gave him the validation that he so desperately needed at the time. 

But when he returned home from the missions trip, nothing really changed. In fact, for the rest of his time in high school things actually got worse. His mother stayed out for weeks and his dad was around even less. His younger brother started to get into trouble at school, and James became responsible for them.  

Let’s stop the story here. What concerns are you noticing in James’ story? Two overarching themes that I see are abuse and abandonment.

James assumed that leaving home would make these things better, and it did for a while. He attended a Christian college and started his intercultural missions training. He met the love of his life there, and together they joined an internship in West Africa. During their internship there was an unexpected political coup, and although the fighting wasn’t close, James started having panic attacks and nightmares of being beaten and left for dead. He didn’t tell anyone, though, so no one knew that he needed help. He thought leaving Africa would fix it and that everything would be ok. It did for a while.

Five years later James and his wife finished their partnership development and headed to East Asia. They lived in a town, but their ministry was in a village about four hours away. He and his wife had regular first-term stresses which included his wife giving birth to their second child. They didn’t really have anyone to talk to about what was going on, and everyone back home thought they were fine because their newsletters were full of exciting ministry opportunities. But he started getting angry over little things and started working more. He and his wife started fighting for the first time in their marriage.

After two years on the field they came to the States for a required six-month furlough. They had a two-hour administrative debrief with their agency, and they told them they were fine, just tired – although they did mention they could use a weekend away because baby number three was due in two months. 

They returned for their second term with three kids ages three and younger. Things in town were worse this time around. The police were starting to ask for bribes at the checkpoints. If James didn’t pay, he would be interrogated and possibly beaten, so he paid the bribes even though he didn’t feel right about doing so. It was the first time he feared for his family’s safety.

Then one day on the way to the local market he saw a small child being beaten. He was in total shock because he had never seen that kind of thing in his passport country. Giving bribes and watching a child almost die caused him deep guilt and shame. He started shutting down and began staying late at the office. There was a young, national secretary there who listened to him when it seemed like his wife wouldn’t. Fortunately he caught himself before that relationship turned into an emotional affair, but he became mired in even more guilt. 

James was having problems sleeping and started using alcohol as a coping mechanism. He decided that if this was missionary life, he didn’t want any part of it. He couldn’t put a finger on a moment when it all went wrong. He started crying out to God, but God was silent. Why was He allowing this to happen? He started meeting with a friend to talk about what was happening and started feeling better.

Then COVID came. They were close to the epicenter and had to evacuate the country within 24 hours, leaving behind their house church and the friends they had just started discipling after six years of being in the country. He said, “How can I just leave them there? They could all die.” 

Let’s stop the story there. What potentially traumatizing events are you seeing now?

You’re probably seeing quite a few, but I want to point out two possibilities: moral injury and survivor’s guilt.

Moral injury is usually associated with military personnel and can occur in response to acting on or witnessing behaviors that go against an individual’s values and moral beliefs. This causes a deep sense of guilt and shame or what the Trauma Healing Institute calls a “soul wound.” Moral injury showed up when James had to pay bribes and watch a child almost die from being beaten.

The second trauma James experienced is survivor’s guilt. This happens when a person has feelings of guilt because they survived a life-threatening situation when others did not. War veterans, cancer survivors, and yes, even missionaries can all experience this. For James, it was leaving behind their house church and the friends they had just started discipling after six years of being in the country.

Let’s finish the story. When COVID led the family back to the States, little did they know that they were not going to be able to return to East Asia. James felt stuck, overwhelmed, disillusioned, and totally out of control. Because of their evacuation, they couldn’t bring anything back to America, not even his wife’s grandmother’s china, and for him that was the last straw.

He got physically sick and isolated himself. The isolation left him bitter with God for allowing these bad things to happen and not protecting them, and he had no idea what to do. He said, “I thought we were going to live there forever. What do I do now, and who am I now?”

The evacuation experience led to two more potentially traumatic outcomes: cumulative grief and loss of identity. 

Cumulative grief “is what happens when you do not have time to process one loss before incurring another. The losses come in too rapid a succession for you, the bereaved, to heal from the initial loss.”

Identity loss involves “questioning your sense of self or identity.” 

James knew in his head that he was supposed to suffer for the kingdom, but this was just too much. At this point, he had lost all hope. 

He didn’t know that he had experienced traumas, but he did know that he had lost his sense of Order, Justice, and Self Value.

Thankfully there are specific steps a global worker can take to process grief and heal from traumatic experiences, and thankfully James reached out for help at this point in his journey. 

The last article in this series will focus on the steps people can take toward healing.

 

*For privacy purposes, James is a composite of several clients. However, his story is representative of the types of trauma that workers on the field endure.

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Shonna Ingram is the founder and director of the Renewed Hope Approach, a program that provides a practical approach to Post Trauma Care. She’s been in ministry for over 20 years and spent 8 years in Africa as a missionary. Shonna is a Board Certified Master Trauma-Informed Mental Health Coach specializing in career, self-development, and spiritual formation, and she has trained hundreds of people in over 30 countries to integrate mental health into a biblical framework. Her heart for people in the re-entry season led her to create her second series, Your Re-Entry Path, as a way for them to figure out their next season, whether inside or outside of vocational ministry. She is mom to 4 amazing adults.

The Unseen Trauma of the Mission Field: What Trauma Is and What It Does

by Shonna Ingram

In 2008 my husband and I took our four children to East Africa to serve in a Bible translation project. We didn’t go overseas until our early 30s. We thought that having some life experience would give us a little bit of an advantage over those joining missions right out of college. But my second year, I still cried and highlighted the entire book Expectations and Burnout by Sue Eenigenburg and Robynn Bliss. 

Our time overseas had its normal ups and downs plus a few unexpected challenges. When it was time to leave the field, we felt like we left well. However, our re-entry season put me into another season of unmet and unclear expectations which included loss of financial support, physical illness, and a long list of other losses. It was during this season that I realized I was experiencing trauma responses, but I had no idea how that had happened. 

According to my understanding of trauma at the time, I hadn’t experienced trauma. So why was I experiencing trauma responses?

In college, I’d been trained in mental health, so I thought I knew something about trauma. However, back then (in the early 1990s) we weren’t taught about neuroplasticity, and I didn’t know the brain could change. I had been taught that trauma was one bad or terrifying experience that I might never recover from. I couldn’t recall anything like that ever happening to me. 

All I knew was that during my re-entry season, I felt stuck, depressed, and confused. I was in physical pain, and I had lost hope. I couldn’t put a finger on one event that had caused these trauma responses, and what’s more, I didn’t know how to get out of this situation.

My coping mechanism was to learn everything I could about the word trauma in the hope that I could understand what was going on and eventually help others avoid the pain I was going through. 

Through trauma healing training, I discovered that while it was true that trauma can be a big, terrifying, life-altering event, it also can be smaller ongoing events that topple over each other. And if we don’t have an opportunity to process these smaller events like we do the big, one-time event, it can lead to the same results in our brain, body, and heart.

Since that experience, I have coached and trained hundreds of people in mission organizations and faith-based communities about trauma. 

There is so much to share with you about trauma, especially as it pertains to the mission field, that I broke up the topic into three articles. In this article, we will talk about what trauma is and what it does. In the next article, we will look at how trauma might show up in the life of a missionary, and in the third article, we will look at some steps you can take toward healing.

 

What Trauma Is

A few years ago I led a trauma healing training and asked the participants, “When you hear the word trauma, what comes to mind?”

There were so many different answers to this one question. The answers were anywhere from what happened during a traumatic experience to how trauma affects people after the event. It was an “ah ha” moment for me because for many people there seems to be some unclarity about what trauma is. 

So I shared this definition with them:    

“Trauma results from any event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life-threatening and that has lasting negative effects on a person’s mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.”

In that discussion I focused on the idea of lasting negative effects and whether the event(s) caused them to lose their sense of either Order (the world makes sense), Justice (justice is available), or Self Value (knowing that they are a person of value), or all three.   

This means that two people can go through the same experience, and one might become traumatized while the other one doesn’t.

I also noticed that the participants were assuming that there was only one type of trauma, when there are actually different types of traumas. Some general types of trauma include:

Acute Trauma (the one people think of the most) is a one-off traumatic event, such as a car accident, natural disaster, etc. 

Complex Trauma occurs during the developmental years when there is a disruption in the child’s development. This can be seen in cases of neglect, child endangerment, or institutional care and can result in insecure attachment.

Chronic Trauma is a traumatic event over a long period of time, such as with domestic abuse or bullying.  

Secondary Trauma occurs when an individual hears about the firsthand experience of others.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is an anxiety disorder caused by very stressful, frightening, or distressing events. A person may engage in avoidant behavior, live in a state of high alert, or even relive the event. (If these symptoms last more than 30 days, a person should be evaluated by a mental health professional.) To learn more about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in cross-cultural workers, check out this Missio Nexus article. 

 

What Trauma Does

During this training I noticed that the participants were only looking at the behaviors of people in trauma and not what was going on inside their brain, body, and heart. But the internal response is very important because trauma disconnects and causes disintegration in our brain, body, and heart.

Trauma affects your BRAIN by changing brain chemistry levels of substances like: 

  • Serotonin (which affects appetite, sex drive, mood, and the ability to sleep)
  • Dopamine (which affects memories and your ability to concentrate) 
  • Endorphins (which reduce pain and stress) 
  • Cortisol (which affects adrenaline)
  • Neurotransmitters and receptors (Glutamate and GABA/gamma-aminobutyric acid)

Sometimes these chemicals can only be fixed with medication; however, there is mounting evidence that exercise and rest can do some of this as well. 

Trauma affects your BODY by getting stuck in your nervous system, usually in both your voluntary and involuntary responses:

  • Somatic Nervous System, which controls voluntary responses to external stimuli
  • Autonomic Nervous System, which controls involuntary responses and includes the Sympathetic (fight or flight response) and Parasympathetic (the way your body relaxes)

Trauma affects your HEART by distorting your relationship with God, others, and ourselves:

  • Trauma can become the lens through which you see everything that happens. You might start questioning the truth and what is real. 
  • It can lead people to question their faith.
  • Trauma can isolate you from others.
  • Trauma can trigger emotional self-harm (such as believing lies) or physical self-harm (such as cutting).

Is it any wonder people are unclear about this word trauma? 

Because of all this disintegration, you might think that trauma would be hard to heal. What I have seen and experienced is that it depends. It is true that healing from trauma is a process and that no single method or therapy works all the time and in all seasons. Sometimes people go through a six-week trauma healing class, and that’s all they need to start their healing process. On the other hand, I have also walked with people for years using different methods and approaches to help them heal from trauma. 

The important thing to remember is that there is help for healing your trauma. In the next article, we will discuss how trauma might show up on the mission field.

 

Recommended Resources:

Hand Brain model from Dr. Daniel Siegel

Expectations and Burnout: Women Surviving the Great Commission by Sue Eenigenburg and Robynn Bliss

More details on complex trauma   

PTSD article from Missio Nexus

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Shonna Ingram is the founder and director of the Renewed Hope Approach, a program that provides a practical approach to Post Trauma Care. She’s been in ministry for over 20 years and spent 8 years in Africa as a missionary. Shonna is a Board Certified Master Trauma-Informed Mental Health Coach specializing in career, self-development, and spiritual formation, and she has trained hundreds of people in over 30 countries to integrate mental health into a biblical framework. Her heart for people in the re-entry season led her to create her second series, Your Re-Entry Path, as a way for them to figure out their next season, whether inside or outside of vocational ministry. She is mom to 4 amazing adults.

A lament for the griefs we don’t have time to grieve

by EC Nance

April and May are usually a grieving season for mission communities. This year it has been particularly rough. Schools closed without warning. People evacuated with a day’s notice. Graduation ceremonies moved online. Children face the prospect of never seeing friends again, without having done the leave-taking. I wrote the following poem as a reflection on this crazy season.

 

I live in a community that lives
in a semi-permanent state of grief
always separate
always strange
always leaving
always being left

but this season
the rhythms of grief
have been interrupted
so the fruit is left on the tree
to swell
sagging with tears

the separations
too rough
the strangeness
too jarring
the leaving
too fast
the being left
—well, what is left
but a splitting
where there should have been
a harvest feast.

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EC Nance lives with her family in SE Asia where her husband works at an MK school.

Moral Injury

I first learned the term “moral injury” in a Plough magazine article by Michael Yandell, Hope in the Void. He quoted authors Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini who say moral injury, “comes from having transgressed one’s basic moral identity and violated core moral beliefs…Moral injury destroys meaning and forsakes noble causes. It sinks warriors into states of silent, solitary suffering, where bonds of intimacy and care seem impossible.”

Foreign Policy magazine describes moral injury as “damage done to a ‘person’s conscience or moral compass by perpetrating, witnessing, or failing to prevent acts that transgress moral and ethical values or codes of conduct.”

Can you think of ways you have experienced this in your life abroad?

We know about female genital mutilation and cannot stop it. We turn away from the begging children. We participate in economic inequality. We are inappropriately respected or honored because of the color of our skin or our passport and we do little to stop it. We huddle behind locked doors and guarded, walled compounds when disorder breaks out in the streets. We pay the bribe to get our mail or our water turned on.

This is not how we imagined serving, helping, or changing the world. We are humanitarians, we are people motivated by faith and by a desire to serve and help. Some of us thought we could change the world, only to discover we are complicit in harm, subconsciously or not.

About his own memories of serving as a soldier in the Iraq war, Yandell wrote, “I know I am not who I thought I was. I am something different, something I never planned on being.”

Another way to think about moral injury is as a wound to the soul.

I am not heroic and I know this far better now, after 16 years abroad, than I ever would have learned had I stayed in the US. I am the opposite of heroic. Living here has stripped away all illusion of moral superiority or high character. I stand exposed.

All my high ideals and righteous ambitions lie in tatters at my feet while people around me go hungry and I can never feed them all. When injustice reigns and I don’t protest. When racism rules and I benefit.

And that’s just what I’m willing to publicly confess.

I know now, who I am. I am not who I thought I was or who I intended to be.

Oh how deeply runs the chasm between who I thought I was and who I now know myself to be.

Oh how much greater my knowledge of my need for a grace I cannot earn.

This is not about moving abroad and learning how selfish and greedy and impatient and proud you are. (I learned all that too) This is darker, deeper, and more damaging.

Moral injury is a heavy, serious topic that deserves much deeper exploration than a single blog post. I’ll provide some links below and encourage you to explore the idea on your own, to see how you may have been impacted, or not. And then I encourage you to find a place where you can be honest and courageously vulnerable so that you can find healing.

Does this resonate with you? How? And how can you move toward healing?

The Headington Institute

Hope in the Void, Plough Magazine

Foreign Policy The Warrior and Moral Injury

Psychology Today: Moral Injury

What an evacuation taught me about naivety, arrogance, and God

evacuation-sign-1738375_960_720a

Before going to live in a third world country we had a lot of people come to us concerned for our children. I remember standing so tall and proud as I answered them and said I was sure of a few things. One was that we were definitely called. Since that was the case, it meant our kids were also called to go with us, and God would protect them. But I’ll be honest — my heart as a mom was not so sure. However, as I went to the Father with my questions, I didn’t hear a response so much as receive an immense amount of peace and assurance of His love for all of us.

I determined that more than anything – more than safety, a life of ease, health, happiness, or contentment — I wanted my kids to really know Jesus. I wanted them to hand their whole hearts and lives over to him – to eat, sleep, and breathe the Holy Spirit. I wanted a passion and intimacy in their relationships with Him that would cause me to seek for a deeper one. I wanted them to truly experience God in the fullness of who He is.

That kind of experience usually does not happen in a “perfect” world.  If I am trying too hard to protect and shelter, I could actually be making it harder for them to see and know God.  How can one know the true meaning of Him being made stronger in our weakness if one doesn’t experience one’s weaknesses?  How can we know the closeness of God that comes in nothing but complete brokenness if we are never broken ourselves?  I’ve been through some brokenness, and I know the sweetness of coming through that with God. I desire that for my children.

I wanted my children to know and understand that they are so very important to me, and I would never do anything to intentionally hurt them, but that God loves them even more than I do and that His plan is perfect. I wanted them to know that they are my priority – but they are NOT the only people in this world. I wanted their eyes open to the fact that God loves them in an immense and perfect love – and He also loves the little ones all across the world with that same intense and perfect love. These things are hard to comprehend if you don’t really see other parts of the world.

And if I’m really being honest, I never really believed my family was in danger.

A few years later, coming out of a place where we were on lockdown and in the middle of war, I think back to these convictions I had before, and I get so angry.  Who did I think I was? I didn’t really know or understand anything in the comfort of my safe little home in the States.  I didn’t know what was coming.

I didn’t know when I ripped teenagers away from their familiar worlds with friends and technology and family and clean drinking water and fast food and air conditioning how much anger would erupt from that. I didn’t understand how living in a war-torn, remote, isolated place could cause such a deep wound on the hearts and psyche of all of us. And I didn’t know that of course it would mean that I couldn’t take care of the 6 of us – I couldn’t take care of myself.  It was a daily lesson in survival for spiritual and emotional health.

I had known war was happening there – but what did that really mean to me other than movies and history class? I had not lived through gun fire, burnings of compounds, and assassination attempts on people I knew before. I wasn’t prepared for those people to have a real face, a name, a family. To have them cry with me about it. Or worse yet – not talk about it with a stone-faced look because it was all too normal.  I had gone through hostage simulations, but I never lived with a go-bag packed so we could take off with a change of clothes, malaria meds, and important documents in a matter of minutes.  Growing up in a rural area, I had shot a gun before – but at a tin can target, not a person.  And I had never seen tracer fire or heard AK-47s – I’m not in the military, after all.

When I said those things before we left I must have been completely naive.

When we left our first place of ministry and came to a safe place to process the huge amounts of grief and fear we had felt in that past year, I started to see the effects it had on my kids. I knew I had been naïve. I was embarrassed because I had said it all so strongly to people and now I wasn’t even sure I believed any of it.  It had felt good and empowering, and pretty darn prideful if I’m willing to admit to being that mom that had all the right answers and was brave enough to go. Missionaries – we can be such arrogant creatures at times.

Then I watched an episode of NCIS (isn’t that how all good spiritual revelations start?).  They were in our country – the one we had just left. I realized from the first scene it wasn’t just a TV show for me. I found myself in tears at the first sighting of the makeshift hospital tent where people were all gunned down.  I felt panicked at seeing the gun ships come in. I felt homesickness for the people, the landscape, and the accents that seemed so familiar. Because yes, it had been hard, but it was also so good.  I experienced over and over the hospitality and love of a people that were not willing to give up or to give in to bitterness.  I heard stories of loss and grief that ripped my heart in two and put a burning desire for justice to be brought forth.  I learned anew what hope looked like even when it made no sense.

My kids experienced all these things right alongside us. Over and over again their hearts and eyes were opened to things that seemed harsh but are realities to many of the people of this world. My daughter says she remembers clearly when we were on lockdown and she realized the people we served among had no choices. We talked about evacuation and safety and looked at our options while grieving what we were leaving, but at least we had options. She also said she realized people were glad for us that we had that option because they cared about us and wanted us safe. It opened her compassionate and empathetic heart up to being a justice seeker. My son has said that though our time there was hard and he found himself angry most of the time, he has since understood things about himself and his relationship with God that he would not have come to on his own, and he is a better man for it.  He actually thanked us for this experience.

Would I have liked to spare my children from some of the things they have seen and known?  Certainly that’s true from a human mother’s perspective. Yet I love seeing who my children are becoming today, and I know a big part of that was this crazy time of life. Their hearts are open to other people and passionate for the world to know the love of Christ.

I forgot that for a while. I got caught up in the momentary things and didn’t see the molding and shaping of things that were happening inside. I forgot that this world really isn’t our home and there is a purpose for each of us here. Grief can draw out a sense of purpose in you the way that a life of ease cannot.

So today I stand by my naive self and the statements I made a few years ago. I stand more battered, slightly scarred, and much more humbled. But I stand. And I pray for my family to have boldness and compassion, to embrace the brokenness and seek him out, to repeatedly be brought to the place where we remember He is enough, and to be justice seekers and truth bringers to this world.

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meHeather Wallace is a wife of 20 years and mom to 4 amazing, globe-trotting children, a pastor’s wife and missionary, a Jesus-lover, Spirit-seeker, and sojourner of this world. She blogs at wallacesinafrica.com