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I will confess something here, to see if anyone else had the same feelings. When I was in high school and had just gotten back from Brasil we were sitting in church and the pastor was talking about how great it is to do missionary work. My heart was filled with pride, oh yes how it goes before a fall, over the fact that I had spent most my life traveling back and fourth from mission fields across the world. The pastor then asked for everyone who had done missionary work to please stand up. I really was expecting my family to be standing alone but when I stood up I noticed that a great number of people also stood with us. I was floored by this, what were they thinking? Then I realized that anyone who had ever did any typle of witnessing trip had stood up. The youth had traveled to the Bahamas to teach VBS for a week, some had gone to New York for VBS and others had done similar short trips. Here I was feeling pretty shorted as far as recognition went, how could they call that missionary work?
As a missionary kid I did not feel like I fit in anywhere. I was strange to the American kids, always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. My clothes never were in style and I never owned the newest nicest things. My family was considered strange even to my family members who stayed in the states. Adding to that is the fact that my family did not stay on one field or with the same mission. We went from Africa to Bolivia to Brasil. Each time returning to the states for a while. So we would make friends on one field only to lose them when we moved onto the next. We would leave the states when one song was very popular and return a year later still wanting to sing it only to find out it had turned "uncool" months ago. We were not American enough for the kids here and we were "too American" in the eyes of the parents on the field. Bad influences on their children. Imagine how horrified a parent would be if their child hung out with someone who was singing a song where a boy actually kissed a girl! It is tough to fit in anywhere when you have no true identity.
My husband often told me, before all of this broke open, that I had lived a very sheltered life. In a way it is true, I will never fit in with the culture, and I will forever be saying the wrong thing. I can live for long periods of time without seeing any extended family whatsoever, and I feel the need to move about every three years. I love my family, my house, and my neighbors but when I look out my back window I find myself daydreaming of some foreign place far away. When I stir the fire in the fireplace sometimes the smell transports my brain to Africa and I am once again walking of a dirt road smelling the fires, or eating the fried dough, or the fries smothered in beef juice, but then in an instant I return to here and all I see is my fire in my house. I have questions as to if I will ever feel normal, like I belong, like I fit in. Will I ever be perfectly content to be where I am, or will I forever feel the pulling to travel around the world? If I did move overseas which country would I feel at home in? I have always longed, since I was a little girl, to make it back to Africa, but I have loved Bolivia and Brasil as well.
I was small in Africa but I can remember a lot from my time there. A lot of the shots as well, seeing as how my older sister and I would always run and hide when it was time to get more. In Brasil there was a series of rapes around the outside of our "Center" so the girls had to wait for a missionary boy to come and walk us wherever we needed to go for a while, which got very tiring. And in the Jungles of Bolivia one missionary family showed us their secret compartment in their house that they would have to quickly get open and hide if gorilas ever attacked the village they lived in. I had seen the movie "When things Seem Impossible" so I could only imagine having to be prepared for something like that. And here people were standing in my church because they had taught VBS for a week somewhere. I just did not get it...that is until I was older and realized that to serve God you did not have to be half way around the world. Serving God does not always require a malaria shot. The more I look around this land the more I realize we need more "home" missionaries. It seems as if we were so concerned with reaching the uttermost parts of the Earth that we forgot to look at ourselves and those around us to make sure we were right with God.
So for the ones on fire for God right now in the band at church, in the Sunday School Classroom, and the VBS programs I say thank you and I am proud to have you stand with me.
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