“So” said the kindly woman at the Baptist church. “You must want to be a missionary too when you grow up!”
I recoiled. I hoped she wouldn’t see the visible distress on my face. She was so kind. How could I disappoint?
But NO, I didn’t. I didn’t want to be a missionary when I grew up. I didn’t want to raise support. I didn’t want to go from church to church in small New England towns. I did not want prayer letters or ‘deputation’. No. I was 18 years old. I wanted college and boyfriends and travel and stamps in my passport. And then down the road? Down the road I wanted to go overseas again, but I wasn’t sure in what capacity.
There are a couple of things that can be a huge burden to missionary kids and their parents.
One is behavior. Missionary kids have just as many reasons to rebel as any other kid. Some might argue, more. Our world contains pitfalls that can catch and take us down. I know. I was one who found marijuana growing in the back of Holy Trinity church, that noble and historic church in the town of Murree that the entire missionary community would attend every summer. It’s easy for us to use excuses of belonging and identity to rebel. And then it’s easy for a parent to feel guilt “if we hadn’t brought our kids half way around the world etc. this wouldn’t have happened…” while the reality is that when a kid is bent on bending rules it’s going to happen anywhere.
The second burden is ‘calling’. Because calling is a word loaded with question marks and misunderstanding.
My parents were called. Called first to God Himself, second to a life of service that took them places where all was initially unfamiliar. Foods, clothing, housing, plumbing, language, faith expression — all of it was new. It had to be learned and learned with humility and willingness to admit mistakes.
Along the way they had babies. And sometimes more babies. And what was unfamiliar to them was home to us, their children. We first heard words and phrases in English, Urdu, and Sindhi. Curry was a staple, the call to prayer their first alarm clock. None of this spelled strange, it was all familiar.
But pressure that this would be a ‘calling’ simply because we were the children of missionaries was uncomfortable.
On the one hand it seemed to make sense, like a family business where one by one the kids take their place behind the counter. But how many kids actually end up in the family business? How many children of nurses, teachers, and mechanics become nurses, teachers, mechanics? Some do. But others follow another path, walk a different journey.
Ultimately the call of God isn’t a business, it isn’t an occupation. It’s a unique word, heard in the heart and obeyed with the mind and body. A unique word that is planted and watered until it grows into an active, living, breathing call.
Missionary kids are called. But they are called to God Himself. After that – it’s anyone’s guess. After that it could be to a small town in England, a large city in North America, a tenured professorship at a university, a foreign service position with the state department.
Rarely does it look the same as the parents. Our journey often begins through the faith and calling of our parents, rooted in the past but grown and sustained through our own decisions of faith.
Threaded through each strand of our DNA is indeed a Call. A Call described best by the ever-challenging words of St. Augustine to “Love God and enjoy Him forever”. Only that Call is carefully entwined in our spiritual genetic code from head to toe, from heart to soul.
And after that it’s anyone’s guess.
Blogger’s Note: In February I wrote a post with the title “Lost to a Call”. In that post I distinguished between a call with a little ‘c’ and the Call with a capital ‘C’. This frames some of the background of this post.
