Some questions people ask when they find out I'm an MK (and the excruciatingly honest answers) Part 3

 
So far in this series I've addressed the questions:  "Did you like it?" and "Do/did you want to do it?". The final question I'll be looking at is "Why do people do cross cultural missions?"

To tell you the truth I have only been asked this a few times.  Mostly "believers" don't ask.  But once in particular, when I was talking with an "unchurched" friend about some of the difficulties of living in a developing country she asked "why do it?"  Other times people don't ask outright, but express the opinion that people are better off left with the traditions and beliefs that they have held for thousands of years.

Of course I'm not the best person to answer this type of question since I have decided not to do it.  But I did have a simple and fairly good (I think) answer ready when my friend asked.  "If you believe that you have the most important message in the world you want to share it with people."  That was the whole discussion.  She was not interested in what the message was or why it was important.  I figured if she wanted to know she would ask.

Naturally there's a bigger picture.  Obedience was always a big theme in the discussion of missions when I was growing up.  The Great Commission.  Going to "unreached peoples groups."   My parents were with a group started by a pioneering missionary named Hudson Taylor.  Faith was an important part of the identity of the group.  They had a screening process to decide who to accept and required extensive training.  The goal was "career missionaries,"  although they did also work with short-term individuals and groups.

My parents started preparing for this life (although they didn't initially know exactly what it would look like) when I was an infant.  We went to the Philippines when I was seven years old.  I think that I was in high school when my dad started to talk about the importance of loving the people he was working to reach.  It might not have been a completely new concept but it was a new emphasis as far as I was aware.All of which is to say that in my experience cross cultural missions was not particularly "touchy feelly."

So to sum it up: obedience, faith and love have always seemed to me like the reasons people do cross cultural missions.  All of these are based, in the Evangelical Christian movement on an understanding that the Bible tells us who and how to obey, have faith in and love. 

All of this doesn't really explain, though, why some Christians go to "the ends of the earth" and others don't.  Personally my theory is that it has to do with a combination of personal conviction, life circumstances, personality and desire.  Although in a married couple one spouse may be reluctant and go primarily out of a sense of duty it's my experience that to a certain degree people who do cross cultural missions want to - although they may express this as a sense of calling.

My only issue with any of this (and I guess the reason this post fits into this series) is that the children in a given family may or may not have any of the above mentioned convictions personality or desire (although they obviously do have the circumstances).   In my experience missions is different from other career paths.  It's not something parents do from nine to five Monday through Friday.  It affects every aspect of every family member's life.  It changes the way needs are met.  It creates identities and changes how people look at the world.

Basically, many would argue that this is a spiritual endeavor - an attempt to live out Luke 9:23 where Jesus talks about denying self, taking up one's cross and following him.  But he starts out by saying "Whoever wants to be my disciple..."  It's supposed to be voluntary.  But for children it isn't.

This is getting pretty long, but I just want to end on a positive note.  To those who have felt that "interfering" with another culture is a mistake it has always felt natural to me to (try to) explain the difficult circumstances that most unreached groups are in.  I believe that modern missionaries typically strive to honor what is good in a culture and bring grace and light to destructive elements.  I recently read this article that talks about an academic study showing that modern evangelical missionaries have been agents of positive change in countries around the world.  Turns out that the presence of missionaries tends to lead to more democratic governments and higher rates of education among other improvements.  I find this encouraging.

Some questions people ask when they find out I'm an MK (and the excruciatingly honest answers) Part 2

I'm eating rice crackers and chocolate covered raisins and drinking tea as a sorry substitute for lunch in hopes that I can get this blog post written and stop writing it over and over in my head.  Here goes.

The most common question people ask me when they find out that I grew up in the Philippines because my parents were missionaries there is "Did you like it?"  As I said before, the short answer is no.

Another question they frequently ask, even after I've answered the first one, is "Did/do you ever want to be a missionary yourself?"  And again, the short answer is no.  Not even a little bit.

Sometimes I feel guilty about this.  Missionary kids, after all, can make excellent missionaries.  Terms like "world view" and ideas like currency exchange and culture shock are old hat to us.  We know the jargon.  We may even have connections in our "home" country that will help us raise support.  We're sort of halfway through the door.  So I feel a little like I need to defend my decision.  Or at least explain it.

The first reason why not seems pretty obvious to  me, but I'll say it anyway.  I didn't have a great experience with cross cultural missions to begin with.  I do not like to pack, travel or say good-bye.  I'm not even very good at saying hello.  I associate Evangelical cross-cultural missions with a time in my life when I felt alone and deeply hurt.  I'm pretty sure that I will never be able to do enough therapy to get me to the place where I could put myself in that "system" again.  Certainly as a young adult I was not healthy enough to attempt it. 

Also, on the shallow side, I enjoy the creature comforts afforded by living in the United States.  Seriously, have you seen the road system here?  Used the infrastructure?  Gone grocery shopping?  People complain all the time about the hassles, but they really have no idea what the alternatives are.  Does your home have six foot high walls around the property?  I didn't think so.  Is it kind of a big deal when your power goes out?  Yeah.  I like that about life here.  People are kind of wimpy.

And I am extremely wimpy.  To the point that in college I was actually comforted by the fact that the mission boards I was familiar with at the time would not have accepted me even if I had wanted to go.  I started taking anti-depressants as a young adult.  That would have pretty much ruled me out.  Since then my health has crashed majorly and although I'm currently doing somewhat better I'm nowhere near healthy enough to pack up my family and move across the world.

Then I come to the question of my own faith, which I rarely discuss in casual conversation.  I got a link on Facebook recently to a survey that the school I went to in the Philippines created for former students.  Largely they seemed to be interested in how well they had done in preparing students for "ministry".  I responded pretty positively.  Because by every objective measure I can think of they did a good job.  The Evangelical missionary community around that school lived out what they believed.  They set aside many "controversial" issues in order to work together to maximum effect.  I was shocked by some of the differences when I came back here to the U.S.  I was exposed to a model of ministry that said "Jump in.  Do the important stuff."  It was sort of like a Nike commercial.

But at the end they wanted to know if I am involved in a ministry now.  And I said no.  I made a comment about how my health and caring for my small children prevent it, which is partly true.  Also, though, I struggle with my faith.  Over the years I have hungered to experience God.  Sometimes I have.  Other times, for long periods, I have persevered in spite of a lack of comforting or encouraging experiences in my spiritual life.  More recently I have started to examine some of the truths that I have taken for granted all my life and to think that they do not fit as snugly into the slot of "clearly defined" as I had assumed.  So I haven't had many times in my life where my faith has been one that felt strong enough to propel me across oceans and continents.

It's not that I'm opposed to other people going - although perhaps the reason I'm writing these posts is that I feel that those who do should be realistic about the costs. And it's not that I didn't feel "called."  I don't think that anyone needs a special invitation to serve God - even in radical ways.  But I did not and do not feel able.  And the bottom line is that I do not want to go.

My thoughts on why people become missionaries can be found here.

(In case you need a chuckle now that link in the last paragraph is to a Youtube video of Ron White talking about hunting.  In the first ten seconds or so he says that pretty much exactly - I don't want to go.  He makes it funny.  He can get a little raunchy and I didn't watch the rest of the video just now - seen it in the past though....just so you know.)

Faith and Science: Some Details of the Big Bang

I wasn't going to do a follow-up on my creation vs. evolution post.  It went pretty well.  I had a few discussions on Facebook and everyone was friendly.  Plus, I don't have a whole lot more information on the topic to enlighten you with.  But then I saw this post on Buzzfeed which is described as a series of questions by self-identified creationists for Bill Nye.  Some of the questions make me a little bit crazy.  Maybe I can add something to this discussion.

I'm not a scientist.  But I am married to one.  An astrophysicist to be precise.  A Christian man of great conviction and integrity who studies the far reaches of the universe and teaches a class about a topic called "cosmology."  It's about what we know about the universe - also how, throughout human history we have conceptualized and sought to understand it.  Including origins.  Including the"Big Bang Theory" which is questioned in the above post.

Early in our marriage the pastor of the church my husband and I were part of at the time decided to preach a sermon on The Big Bang Theory.  The problem was that he didn't check with the person in his midst who actually had read the scientific papers on the theory and knew what science does and does not claim on the topic.  In the conversations that followed I learned a few facts.

First of all, scientists do start with a few assumptions which some who read and believe in the Bible may disagree with.  Scientists believe that we are not in a special time or place in the universe.  They make their conclusions based on the idea that the natural laws that we observe here and now have applied and will apply in all time and space.

The questions in the Buzzfeed post and some questions and statements I've heard in person from Christians make me think that some people have some misconceptions about these assumptions.  For one thing, people often assume that because scientists only consider the physical universe that they are ruling out the existence of any other reality.  This may sometimes happen, but it is not necessary for someone to take science seriously or to use it as a tool to understand the universe.  Science is a system - a way of observing and exploring the world in order to understand it better.  It values direct, quantifiable observations and rejects appeals to authority.  It sticks to a specific set of knowledge and answers certain types of questions.  It does not comment on even the possibility of the existence of a god who does not exist in the physical realm.

"But," you may say, "I have seen evidence of God all around me.  I see the beauty of a sunset, the wonder of a baby's birth, the amazing complexity of the genetic code.  How can these things be random?  They speak of a mind - a creator."  Maybe so, but until they find some way of directly observing that mind scientists will continue to slog along by observing with the tools they have now.

Second, the Big Bang Theory is based on direct observations and measurements.  Since light takes time to travel to earth astronomers are looking both at distant places and past times in the universe. Assuming that the principles they observe now apply uniformly allows them to draw conclusions about what happened in the past and what will happen in the future.

Third, "Big Bang" is not a very good name.  It implies an explosion of something into something else, which is what we always experience now.  But the theory actually describes a movement of something - matter, energy, space - into....nothing.  I can't really get my head around that.

Fourth, so far, scientist do not have an explanation for where the stuff came from.  And by definition the theory only describes what happens starting from an extremely (astronomically) small portion of time after the movement actually starts.  There is still mystery.  There is room for a creator.

Fifth, astronomers are not so heavily invested in this particular model of how the universe works that they can't admit that previous observations might have led to incorrect conclusions.  Is the expansion of the universe speeding up or slowing down?  The understanding of this question has completely reversed in the past couple of decades.  This does not mean that scientists have no idea what they are talking about.  It means that they make conclusions based on the data they have and as the data becomes more complete their conclusions can be more accurate.  This is fine because they are not asking you to believe anything.  They are trying to understand.

When we get closer to home science does make conclusions and predictions that we end up acting on.  That is a more complicated question and it has to do with the body of evidence - observations and experiments are repeated by different scientists and in different ways.  It gets messy.  But right now I'm sticking to the implications of this one area.

So what's the point?  The Big Bang Theory does not jive with a literal interpretation of the Biblical creation narrative.  It points to a time period much longer than a day during which the universe changed in order to reach the point we observe now.  But scientists who study the theory are not trying to disprove the existence of God. They are using the tools they have to make conclusions about the universe.

Is it possible to interpret scripture in a way that fits with the current scientific evidence?  Possibly.  But personally I don't feel the need to do that.  That's probably a topic for a different post.  Could God have created a universe that only appears to have an incredibly long "lifespan"?  Possibly.  But I don't understand why He would do that.  Could the nature of time have changed at some point?  Possibly, but if so it would most likely have left some kind of evidence which may, at some point be detectible.  The nature of time is something that physicists are extremely interested in.   

Ultimately I believe that we (the Evangelical Christian community) should really take a look around us.  The Bible is not a scientific text.  Science is not a religion.   Using our senses and intellects to observe the world is not a threat to God.  Believing that God ultimately is responsible for the existence of the world is not a threat to science.  But closing our minds to what we might observe because we need the facts to conform to an idea we already have....that isn't consistent with what I believe about the Bible or God.  And it isn't what I see happening in science.  I'd love it if we didn't do that. I'd love it if we decided to use the tools we have and embrace the exciting challenge of learning as much as we can about the world.

To TCKs Who are Launching into Adult Life

I saw this post about TCKs (Third Culture Kids) on Buzzfeed the other day and it got me thinking.  For one thing, how mainstream is being a TCK getting to be these days?  Well after all our president is one, so maybe it's all the rage.

I've seen posts similar to this before and it always strikes me that I'm old because I see something about use of social media and think "you kids today have it so easy!"  When I was your age it cost a dollar a minute for a bad connection on a land line which fortunately my parents finally had in their actual house.  I also think I'm old because I don't even know what some of the forms of social media listed are or how to use them.

I also think that I was never really cut out to be a TCK and am maybe not a good representative of what they are like as adults because I never have liked to travel and don't even know where my passport is.  But I have actually discovered some forms of social media (mostly Facebook) so I know that many of my classmates from the old days also stick pretty close to home.

Which leads me to my final thought and the one that motivated me to write this post.  I want to let TCKs who are just finishing high school and trying to figure out where they belong in the world that some parts of being a TCK get easier over time.  It's true that you never completely grow out of it.  You will probably always eat rice by pushing it with a fork onto a big spoon (that works way better - why change it?).  You may always gravitate toward people from other countries or have an accent that people find confusing.  But there's a good chance that you won't always feel like you don't belong anywhere.  And that "deer in the headlights" feeling you get when someone asks you where you are from will probably fade.

Let me explain.  No.  There is too much.  Let me sum up.  For starters, college.  Everybody there feels a little displaced.  Many are leaving "home" for the first time and just about everyone is meeting for the first time.  So it's on people's mind and they ask "Where are you from?"  Hate that, right?  Because what are they really asking?  What country are you a citizen of?  Where did you spend the most time growing up?  What culture do you identify the most strongly with?  Where will you be going over Christmas break or for the summer?  It's possible that every one of these questions has a different answer.  And then you have to figure out how much they really want to know.  Why are they asking?  How long will they listen?  How much do I really want to think about it right now?

And you don't know anyone and you really want some people to understand.  So you tell the story a lot.  Over time a couple of things happen.  Even while you're still in college you build up a group of friends who knows the story.  Some of them get it, some don't.  You may find some other TCKs.  You may hang out with international students.  But people ask you where you're from less often.

Then you graduate from college.  You get a job.  And from what I can tell lots of people end up finding some place that they call "home."  Some keep moving around or choose the multi-country lifestyle they grew up with but many pick a country and stick with it.  A town even.  Lots of jobs kind of require this. 

What happened to me, eventually, was that I stopped feeling like I had the initials TCK tattooed across my forehead.  I could have whole conversations with people I had never met before and it would never come up.  I could even know someone for months or years without them finding out where I had grown up.  This was not because I was ashamed of my background or even because they were particularly unfriendly or uninterested in me.  It was just because the relationships had specific foundations and purposes that did not require us to ask "Where are you from?"  And also because, after you live some place for a while that is actually where you are from.  Usually.  Sort of.  Enough that doesn't keep coming up in conversation.  Lots of people grew up somewhere other than where they are now living and it's not something people always try to figure out about each other right away.

But it does come up sometimes.  And you do have to get through that initial manic get-to-know-you college time.  So here's my take on how to get through it with the least stress possible:  Have a short answer ready.  Decide ahead of time how you are going to answer the question.  I still use the phrase "I'm originally from...." which works for me because I was born in the town that both my parents grew up in and where I still have extended family living.  But you may need a different phrase like "My family moved around a lot."  Just realize that you are in control of who gets what information.  Not everyone needs the full story.  Some people will be interested and when you get a chance to tell it go for it.  It will help you build that network that will give you a place to belong.

So that about sums it up for now.  Have fun storming the castle!