It’s so annoying that missionaries have lots of kids. How dare they. They’re living off other people’s income while they choose to have as many kids as they want.
When we moved to Missouri 3 ½ years ago, one of the professors we first met was super excited to find out that neither Nate or I had come from a missionary family.
“Wow. New blood! I love it!”
The truth is, most new missionaries are kids who grew up “on the mission field” and have missions flowing through their veins from their parents. Nate’s dad is a software programmer and music director at church, and my dad is a theology professor. Our moms help raise babies and kindergarteners. We grew up in America.
I used to feel a sense of pride that this was my choice and I didn’t grow up this way:
I’m not just being a missionary because that’s all I’ve ever known. I’m not following in my parents’ footsteps. This is my own decision.
But man, how arrogant. How cool is it that missionary parents have had SUCH an impact on their kids that even though their kids have pursued other “normal” career options in America, so many of them have come around to foreign missions with an unreached people group. It’s just inescapable – once you’ve seen an unloved, uncared about, unwanted people be adopted by the God of the universe, how can anything else live up to that?
And so they come back – the missionary kids who grew up in an unreached tribe. They come back. They had corporate jobs in Silicon Valley; they were moms with picket fences; they were nurses; they were wives; they were teachers, but it just didn’t compare. They couldn’t escape the things they had seen. It was castrated in their souls.
What a legacy to leave.
Today, we’re happy as moms to leave “be kind” as a legacy. I hope I leave my kids with way more than a catchphrase.
I hope I leave old blood.
So, my sweet Erin and all my future kids, if you give up your life to find it in pursuit of taking the gospel to an unreached nook of the globe — I’ll just be honored and humbled and weepy.
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