|
Brad Buser, former NTM missionary in PNG, and now director of Radius International, is holding rigidly to the parenting philosophy of previous generations of missionary parents, and proclaims it boldly in his latest newsletter, titled "What About Your Family?".
Excerpts:
I wasn’t surprised on a recent trip, when during a Q&A time, a pretty common question was asked… “With the location you were serving in having the uncertainties it did… how did you insure that disease or local hostilities didn’t impact your family?” The obvious, yet unstated, starting point being that things that would harm my family were obviously to be avoided. That was a given, no need to even discuss it.
When ‘Family First’ or ‘Focus on the Family’ are unquestioned values, everything that puts your wife or children’s safety or even their ‘well being’ in jeopardy is OBVIOUSLY not a course of action the Lord would have you pursue. This no longer needs to be confined to physical harm, separations, death or disease. Today lost athletic or academic opportunities or simply ‘not thriving’ also qualify as things to be avoided.
With such a mindset getting traction in the ‘Christian culture’… how are we to actually complete the Great Commission, or live as the people of God in any sense?
Examples of those who DO NOT value their lives or their children’s’ lives above all else (I am not talking about ‘cavalierness’ here) do exist… even today. Yet sadly a more common reality is a letter I read from a missionary who was leaving the location God had led them to (their own words)… “We will give our lives to full-time ministry, no matter where God places us, but we don’t want to do it at the expense of the family, which, through earnest study of Scripture and wisdom of others, we’ve chosen to make our first priority.”
This situation is not rare today. The amount of families coming home from high stress cross-cultural situations due to ‘family is my first priority and my family is not thriving’ is today unprecedented. In ages past missionaries might have been hesitant to state ‘my kids felt stressed’ as a reason for leaving where God had placed them, not so today. Today such parents may be deemed ‘sensitive and balanced, not being task-driven, having their priorities right’.
When Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it,” in Jn 12:24,5, what He meant was that spiritual growth is inseparably tied to loss, separation, death, suffering, persecution, or hardship.
In Jn 20:21, we read… “Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.’” In speaking in such ways Jesus is clearly saying that He led the way… in message and modeling. Those He is ‘sending’, including their families, can anticipate a version of what Jesus endured first. ‘God called me but not my kids’ has commonly been a rationale for some to leave hard situations. As a parent who saw much, and counseled many other families, I know first hand the difficulties our kids can face, I know too the blessing on those kids when they are allowed to participate in the ‘price tag’ of being gospel workers. I dare not oversimplify all situations, but I know too that what our own children endured was used by God to bring credibility to His message.
|
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
