MK forum

I was a homeschooled MK (and ever so thankful for that!). In our family we had daily devotions after breakfast. My mother had cut out the little pictures from Brown Gold of all the missionary families, and each of us had to pull a card out of the box that was passed around the table, and pray for the people on our card.

I often cheated a bit, in order to pick out a card with kids on it around my age. Particularly families with cute boys in it, like Macon and Ginny Hare! Instead of paying attention at prayer time, I would squint through my eyelashes at those children, and daydream about what their lives were like, in far off places like Brazil, Bolivia and New Guinea. (I had no idea back then that some of them were enduring hellacious tortured childhoods.)

I tried to avoid praying for the boring single people!

So your confessions make me smile, Bemused. My prayers probably weren't particularly helpful either!

This is quite a revelation. My parents did something similar, cut out pictures of missionaries and put them on cards and we had to draw them out. But cute boys didn't do much for me.

You didn't by any chance notice a card with a family of five, a blondish kid looking slightly bemused with it all? That would have been me, ah ha, you did notice that one and that was the one you gave to someone else, well that explains a few things! Well I might be in luck, my sisters got the looks department, so maybe your brother interceded for them?

I of course did pray for the single missionaries, that they would find Mr Right and that his first name wouldn't be Always.

I am pretty sure my parents still have that prayer card box. If we were on speaking terms I could pop round and see if your card is there for you. Would you like me to get one of my sisters to pop round and put it at the front of the pile for you, or send it back as a well thumbed souvenier from Downunder?

Too funny, Raz and Bemused, I needed that. Family devotions, yep and if you didn't have your own devotions,,,no supper for you!

Another sad thing, the Bible was used as punishment in our home. "Go to your room and read I Cor 13 until your anger is gone." I never wanted to use the Bible as part of a punishment,,,it makes you not want to read it any more.

I used to get sent to my room and told not to bother coming out till I decided I wanted to be a christian. Getting hungry was a good motivation for reaffirming my faith in what struck me as a dubious religon, for as I saw it, if it was that good, why did I have to be blackmailed into believing it.
Luckily I survived to tell the tale and am not some skeleton somewhere.
The nice thing about this, is that we can reflect and see the how ridiculous some of all this was and together have a chuckle.

I'm sorry you have to chuckle about things like that.

Poor Dad, he got a rough deal. His only son didn't get married till he was 31 and given the career choice was being a nurse, he was worried I'd jump out of the closet and announce, "I'm a christian and I'm gay!"
Would have been even funnier if I'd announced, "I'm Catholic, Divorced and Gay" as poor Red Baron is convinced the Downunder Wonder Boy is.

Mine was "If you don`t do what I say, God will run out of patience with you and do something bad to you.

We got that one to, usually with an illustration of some recently departed soul, who God took home, because they weren't "walking with the Lord", scared the daylights out of us.

Then there was, you should be grateful you're an MK, cuz look at what them poor natives have to put up with.

A few years ago, when my mother had just become a born again Christian, and I had turned away from walking with God, she use to tell me that my house was full of demons and that they didn't let her sleep, so she had to be up all night praying and casting out demons off my house, and one time she even said that some demon scattered all her belongings onto the garden and all over the house....... another time she said that a demon hit her head so bad, she almost fainted, while a pastor was "cleaning" my house....

I was dead scared in the inside, but never showed her... also thought that she was delusional..... can you guys imagine all this????????