anti-racist homeschool

 If there are two things that have massively shifted in the United States in recent months it’s that the realities of race relations in our country are finally getting the attention they deserve; and second, due to Covid, more families are homeschooling than ever before. I, like many of you, never imagined that I would be a homeschool mom, and yet we are now in our fourth year. What I’ve learned thus far on my homeschooling journey is that my favorite part of being my kids’ teacher is that I have complete control over what they learn and how they learn it. I see homeschool as a golden opportunity to infuse family values into the academic culture of our home, particularly with respect to how we engage race. 

Now before I go any further I just need to put out the disclaimer that we are in no way a precious homeschool family. I use the phrase "homeschool mom" very loosely. I still work full time, I have a million things on my plate and I try really hard to not neglect my kids, which still happens more than I’d like. 

I’m not actually sure we got in 180 days of learning last year. I don’t do cute activities. I don’t teach Latin. There is no morning basket or hymn study because this mama doesn’t have time for that. I am eclectic and minimalist and if you want tips on how to do preschool in the bathtub, I’m your person. 

We do school whenever it's convenient, I delegate tasks to unsuspecting travelers, I multi-task to a fault. It's usually not pretty, and some days I cry, but we make it work. 

 

So with that glowing self assessment to set the stage, hear me when I say that even in the midst of chaos, the things that matter rise to the top, and integrating our values into the academic pursuit is always at the top – our values around racial justice included. 

 

I made an Instagram post about this recently that seemed to really resonate with people and so I wanted to share a bit more about what race conscious home-education looks like for us. 

 

For starters, our free-reading shelves are stocked with books that do a good job of celebrating black culture and acknowledging black struggle. We have acquired as many multi-cultural books as we can get our hands on so that our bookshelves reflect the true diversity of the world and do not perpetuate white exceptionalism. These books are highly curated and screened for content and voice. Our living room books are a reflection of us: we don’t do colorblind; we don’t do white supremacy; we don’t tolerate racist micro aggressions – even in children’s literature. 

 

On our school shelves are stocked with books that I expect to read with them. In this lineup we have the good, the bad and the ugly. The bad and the ugly hold their spots simply because there is value in the debrief. With mom as a guide, we let racism come out of the shadows. These white-supremacist authors might be dead but their proud-boy decedents are still on prime-time television so we engage them. We read of early explorers and talk about the start of the slave trade. We read about the founding of America and the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. We talk about the beliefs that white people had that justified the dehumanization of non-whites. I don’t screen offensive ideas or language. I just stop reading, rest the book on my lap, and call out the racism in every paragraph. We have conversations about how these ideas are equally prevalent today and what we are supposed to do with that. 

 

These conversations are now so common for us that before the word out of my mouth, somebody is protesting, “THEY AREN'T INDIANS. White people should know better – they stole the land from Native Americans.” The mention of slavery makes one child want to punch a wall. These days, the kids rant faster than I do, and honestly, that feels accomplished.  

 

I didn’t grow up racist. Except for the fact that I was taught that Columbus discovered America and that Vespucci and Cortez were mistreated explorers who received an unfortunate welcome in the New World. We read Little House on the Prairie and not once did anyone say the word “problematic.” I was taught that slavery ended with the Civil War and racism ended with MLK. So yeah. I grew up racist. 

 

I want something different for my kids. And that requires not only a different awareness, but also a different response. Like Angela Davis said for all of us to hear and grapple with, It’s not enough to not be racist, you have to be anti-racist.

 

Anti-racism is a matter of acknowledging the status-quo and taking it to task. It's about assessing whether our kids are receiving an education that reinforces white-supremacy or challenges it. The gift of homeschooling, my friends, is that you can sculpt for your children what their anti-racist education is going to look like. For me, this is invaluable. 

 

In addition to the history reading and literature selections, we talk about inequalities in the sciences. We do copy work from Jesuit prayers of lament. Creative writing prompts are meant to provoke contemplation and action. We create art and memorize key scripture. We engage what matters.

 

Anti-racism isn’t a topic. It’s not a unity study. Anti-racism is an attitude and an orientation and a lifestyle. Racism is the air that we all breathe and therefore as parents and educators, our response to that fact needs to be commensurate. If I’m teaching my kids to identify faces on coins, I need to also teach them to identify systems of oppression that put those faces there. If we’re celebrating freedom, we need to teach the barriers to enjoying it. Education ought to prepare our kids up to be functional, wise, contributing members of society. If anti-racism isn't a central theme in that, our society is doomed.

 

I know plenty of people are pushing back against such ideas by saying, “it’s not all about race,” but… it kind of is. Unless humanity suddenly becomes translucent, color matters, always. In my experience, it’s only white people who struggle to see that. I want my kids to appreciate that wherever they are, and in everything they do, they need to be consciously aware of who is in charge, who needs defending, and how to make wrong things right. This requires making sense of the story of race. 

 

This is not as advanced as it sounds. My five-year-old who doesn’t even know her days of the week yet (I told you I wasn't precious) gets it. Like she said to me last week, “We stand up for brown people. It’s what we do.” It’s that simple. Racism and privilege and justice and oppression – these are not mature topics to wait for a grad school class in critical race theory. When we talk about them early, and if we unbind them from shame, our kids are equipped to engage their world with confidence and a sense of purpose. It really just takes intentionality and time, and thanks to the routine of homeschool we JUST. KEEP. AT. IT. 

 

There's a million ways to do this and and the anti-racist education will vary by age, grade, personality etc. My goal here isn't to be dogmatic about method but just to promote that it should be happening. The point is that, for most of us, defaulting to the educational culture that we grew up in is just going to produce more of the same culture that we're now trying to dismantle. And so my word of invitation to every homeschool parent out there, particularly the ones who are struggling to see upside of the covid-driven choice: you have the opportunity and the duty to run an anti-racist homeschool. It’s important. It’s possible. It’s worthwhile. 

 

The world needs us to do this. Let’s live up to our potential. 

where is the hope

 

A few days ago, I messaged one of my nurse friends. “I think I can be creative with Mary’s bandages until the next crate arrives… as long as no one else gets burned.” Today, a little girl whose pants caught on fire showed up at my door. It’s when your ‘just enough’ turns out to be too little that hope comes hard. 

 

My friends who thought they just had to get through the summer are feeling this too. ‘Just enough sanity’ to survive till school starts has been hijacked by school not reopening, and I see a familiar hopeless look in your eyes. 

 

As I lifted the little girl into my tub, giving her Tylenol and cookies to distract her from what was about to happen, I sized up the damage. Thirty percent of the upper thigh, not over any joints. “The clinic sent you home to care for it yourself, didn’t they?” I asked, judging by the gooped on toothpaste and ashes that are considered “traditional medicine” for burns. 

 

Back home my friends are cleaning up different messes. The protest fires of injustice and racism and hate are blazing in Portland and elsewhere and the “traditional medicine” of white supremacy doesn’t debride without tears either.

 

Where is the hope?

 

The little girl started crying as I slowly rubbed away the crust that was clinging angry to the tender flesh. Not recognizing either the girl or her mom by face, I asked where they live. M’wanguni, the mom said, in between telling her daughter to not cry so loud. “That’s two villages over,” I observed, “How did you know to come here?” “I heard from the man whose finger you fixed that you were kind to people like us,” she explained. Ah yes. The man who presented me with a severed finger that the clinic wouldn’t touch except to cover with a square of gauze tied on with a condom. 

 

It’s never ending, the wounding is. For me or you. Breonna Taylor’s murderer still walks free; the poor are being pushed farther out of affordable housing; and demon sperm lady is practically surgeon general.

 

Where is the hope? 

 

There was a time when scenes like this would have wrecked me. More times than I can count, I’ve left a bleeding person alone in my bathroom so I could go outside and sob heavy. And while I’m holding tight to wound supplies and not BLM signs, I feel your pain too – I do. That I can’t march with you, that I can’t help teach your kids’ pod, that I can’t hand you Tylenol and cookies while we tackle this life together – it grieves me in its own way. 

 

Where is the hope?

 

I want to be optimistic; that the Tylenol will take the edge off, that tomorrow the pink skin will magically be brown, that medical neglect will no longer send people to my door. I want to be optimistic for you too; that the Covid curve will angle down and that black communities will be lifted up and that music will return to your streets. 

 

I love the optimists in my life, and I aspire to be one of them. Deeply connected to heart’s desires, goal oriented and stubbornly positive. Optimism motivates us to take risk and study burns and speak truth to power. Optimism serves us well… until it doesn’t. When the next patient is more critical than the last and the next tweet more heinous than the first it’s a sucker punch to the gut and all those Pollyanna thoughts feel childish. Confrontation with reality has sent more than a few optimists into rehab where we’ve tried to make sense of how we could have been so naïve. 

 

Where is the hope?

 

Wiser, more experienced, we get our act together. I order hundreds, not dozens of bandages at a time and silver sulfa now by the gallon. You round up screen shots for facebook ammo and amplify black voices as we try and figure out how to realistically achieve this thing we call healing.

 

But our expectations are tempered more than we admit. Where we no longer pray for miraculous healing and justice is only preached to the choir. Those brave desires have been swapped out for a safer, more cynical version… but at least we’re being realistic, and that feels grounding… though depressing in its own way. 

 

Where is the hope? 

 

Not knowing how to show up for myself, or you, or anyone, I show up to therapy and try to figure out where I am. I learn that the place I find myself is squarely in-between. I learn that God gave us two hands for a reason, so that we might remain deeply connected to our optimistic dreams while also deeply connected to the world’s brokenness. In the space between, wanting so much, and seeing so little, we feel the tension in every cell of our bodies, which opens the possibility of discovering that this is where hope is. 

 

When healed patients feel loved through hours of connection, I find meaning in the pain. Now  I’m hopeful, instead of devastated, by each new story that reaches my door. As I’m watching America from afar, seeing the end of conservative evangelicalism and the emergence of fresh faith, I feel hope for you in so many ways too. Hope lives in the already and the not yet – where we believe that change is possible while still sensing how broken we are. Where the light shines bright and yet darkness still permeates. Where heaven has come and yet is not fully here. This is where hope is.

 

Lament puts words to the insanity of it all. With space for both the longing and doubt that makes us human: That what we experience is awful, but not beyond redemption. That I’m powerless to fix it but I’m empowered by the one who can. That the-God-who-sees is made of everything I am not. That evil is pervasive but there’s more grace than I know. Lament roots us in hope by declaring that suffering is real, but mercy is near, and if everything we long for falls apart, the shattered dreams will, in faith, become the building blocks of a surprising tomorrow. This is where hope is.   

 

And by sowing tears and reaping joy we carry on, hoping against hope that we won’t be disappointed. As I optimistically wrap wounds and realistically still dispense the analgesics. As you optimistically cast your ballots and realistically pray in closets. We can go to task and then go to sleep because the results are not ours to manufacture. It’s in the space between optimism and reality that hope thrives because that’s where God is, involved in what is, working out what will be, and actively transforming everything in the process. And for this reason, and this reason alone, it will be ok. 

 

Hold on to hope, my friends. Let’s hold on to hope. 

  

raising girls amongst karens

Recently, one of my friends of a different race and generation posted a question on social media asking, “What’s a Karen?” He received good responses, mostly copied and pasted from google. I think the tidiest definition for me was:

A Karen is a white woman who feels entitled enough to weaponize her skin color particularly against black men.  

Yup.

Feeling cheeky, I added my own definition, writing, “my face, less woke.” 

Seeing my extra pale skin in the little photo next to the comment I sighed – it’s sad, but true. 

Despite knowing several perfectly wonderful women named Karen, the stereotyped “Karen” as a racist icon has become the meme du jour. They are the wives of Chad, the mothers of Brad and the best friend to Brenda and Becky. All of these people are dangerous but Karen is basically the matriarch of the pro-white movement, so I don’t mind letting her take the fall for the whole lot. 

I was born of white women. Raised by white women. Surrounded almost exclusively by white women. Some turned out to be Karens, others not. Now, having lived a third of my life in Africa, where the white women I interact with are actually one in a million, Karen has its own meaning for me. Here, Karen isn’t going to call 911 for feeling threatened by a black man in a hoodie, but colonialist Karen and white-savior Karen have their own ways of oozing superiority. All that to say, my minority status here doesn’t give me a pass. There’s not a single white woman on the planet who doesn’t need to do business with her inner Karen. Such is the world we live in, and the world we are raising our daughters in too. 

When our first two children came out female and blonde headed, our circle of anti-colonialist, anti-racist, anti-Karen work expanded. “Privilege” in the village takes on specific form, so we started with the basics: you’re not as special as people think you are. We taught them that when they are given free stuff in stores, they don’t deserve it and it must be shared equally with their friends. When an adult takes something out of their child’s hand to give it to the white girls, our kids are obligated to hand it back to the original child. When an adult is displaced in order to put their white butt in a seat, the girls must decline and sit on the floor. These are some of the house rules on par with “chew with your mouth closed” and “say please and thank you.” 

They aren’t perfect. We still have to interrupt their play time to coach them towards kindness. Nine times out of ten they don’t even realize what’s happening when others defer to them. I don’t think your friend is feeling loved, we reflect out loud. Oh, they say, and make a change. The relationship practice gives meaning to the rules. Our goal is to instill habits and attitudes that will support healthy relationships for the long haul. If the rules don’t play out on the playground, they won’t play out in adulthood. There are plenty of right thinking, poorly behaving adults in America right now who know the good they ought to do and are not doing it because theory never became practice. The exercise of relationship hasn’t taken place. 

This is the essence of the Karens who are championing All Lives Matter. They are operating out of a philosophical framework in which “liberty and justice for all” is scrawled across the placards of their lives but for some reason, saying Black Lives Matter strikes a chord. Why? My observation, as I hear their arguments on social media, is that their response is entirely cerebral. I’m not hearing any empathy or connection, and as proof of the absence of relationship bubbles to the top like sulfur, I think about my own girls again.

A few months ago, we were reading for homeschool about Vasco de Gama’s voyages around the horn of Africa during which the slave trade expanded greatly. As I read about Africans being tied up and shipped off as slaves, I could feel the wave of emotion rising in my 8-year-old sitting next to me. As I read on, her gaze lowered, and her brow furrowed. Her fists clenched and she stiffened her whole body until she cut me off with a guttural roar. I stopped reading, knowing that my girl and her big feels was going to need a moment to work through this one. I know her heart and had seen it coming. She sputtered for a moment, the rage flooding faster than her brain could find words for and finally she screamed at de Gama and his crew, “THAT WAS TIMO!!!” (her best friend) “Those are my people! Those are my friends!” And her face fell into her hands and her body flopped on my lap and we sobbed together for a long, long time.

Day to day life for our very white daughters involves constant interaction with people who do not look like them. Their friends are exclusively black. The people they admire are exclusively black. The sources of their greatest joys and most favorite memories are all black. While America is at war with itself over its ingrained fear of black men, our two little white girls are absolutely enamored with a whole community of black men who are not only trusted, but also adored. Through repeated exposure, their brains have been wired to perceive black men as protectors and not threats. So while Karen is calling the police because she’s six feet away from a black man minding his own business, our girls are running straight into the arms of black men whom they love. The idea of black people – their friends – being mistreated is intolerable. And it’s not because our girls are better people, or we’re better parents – it’s simply because they’ve had the right kinds of experience. 

That day, as we read about the start of the slave trade, my daughter got her first taste of dehumanization. By entering into the gallows of the slave ship, she felt helpless and betrayed by her own skinfolk, overwhelmed by 500 years of evil that she couldn’t undo and didn’t know how to make right. I wasn’t going to talk her out of her grief. I’m glad she felt it. The ability to lament deeply the wrongs of people who look like us is a necessary part of growing up un-Karen. 

I’ve been watching the dumpster fire of social media interaction the last few weeks as black folks are BEGGING to be heard and white America is doing a barely mediocre job of listening. The BLM allies are growing increasingly frustrated because they are working overtime in the education department – trying to drop knowledge on every single Karen who is crying taupe tears because her soul is wounded by the idea that anyone else’s life should matter too. I see it. The precious few woke white women are on the verge of hysterics wondering why Karen just doesn’t get it. And of course, Brad, Chad, Brenda and Becky are showing up to add their piece too and the air smells rancid like white supremacy. The riots are visible symbols of invisible pain and moment by moment it's ambiguous whether this is moving forward or backward. 

But none of this should be surprising. Ultimately, America needs to experience healing, and that will never happen if people are not in relationship. What separates the Karens from the people trying to rein them in is that the white people who “get it” all have significant relationships within the black community. 

I’m not talking about “token black friends,” I mean these bridge builders are IN COMMUNITY with people who don’t look like them. They spend considerable time in each other’s homes. Their children are best friends. They share values and a vision for their neighborhood. They break bread. They like each other. They love each other. And the depth of the relational bond is significant enough that when one hurts, the other hurts. Of course their black friends’ lives matter. And it is for these white folks that “dismantling systemic racism” is not an intellectual exercise – it's personal. 

Right now, I’m seeing a lot of resources circling about books to read and conversations to have and that’s awesome, but it isn’t relational enough. Studying black history is essential, but distantly academic. Karens aren’t dumb, they are disconnected – from black pain, from the consequences of their privilege, from reality. I’m pretty sure Karens have google. What they don’t have are black friends. Even if it’s in their heads, it’s not in their hearts, and it’s not in their hearts, because it’s not in their homes. The bridge between knowledge and action is the motivation to care, and that only comes from meaningful relationship. 

Last night Bronwyn was curled up on the couch reading the children’s book Beatrice’s Goat about a little girl in Africa whose family receives a goat from an NGO. Reaching the end, she hopped off the couch and said, “Hey, it says Beatrice lives in a small African village! Do you know where we can find a small African village?” Jeremy and I just looked at each other, and then at her and we both laughed, “Bronwyn, you literally live in a small African village. We literally run a program to manage livestock for 300 families just like Beatrice…” And she just looked at us and was like, Oh. I guess you’re right! Despite the fact that this book was describing the backdrop of her life, it was a story to her and therefore looked new and unfamiliar. Beatrice’s life wasn’t something she was living, it was something she was reading. Text is… textual. But her friends whom she throws her arms around and feels in the flesh – that’s what’s real. 

Children need black hands to shake and hi-five and hold. They need black friends, black teachers, black doctors, and black pastors to admire. Our black son needs to see faces who look like him and our white girls need to see faces who don’t. The key to breaking the Karen cycle is to provide our girls with repeated experiences of sustained, positive interaction with black people – in particular black men – over the course of their growing up years. I don’t believe there is any substitute for this.

I can hear Karen’s brain processing: Not all of us live in Africa, Bethany. Finding this in the middle of Whitesville, USA is hard. There aren’t many black people here.

Good observation Karen! Fostering meaningful relationships might mean changing schools, or changing churches, changing doctor’s offices or neighborhoods or even towns. 

We know families who have uprooted themselves in search of diversity, and I applaud them for that. It may sound radical, but I wouldn’t even be throwing it out for consideration if I wasn’t 110% convinced that it’s worth it. Racial reconciliation requires relationship. Full stop. 

I appreciate that not every family is in a position to actually MOVE, so it does beg the question, how far should the pursuit of racial diversity go? That’s up to you – how much do you want your heart to grow?

Our family would be willing to go pretty darn far. Because we know from experience that it’s not a sacrifice. It’s a gift. To us, and to the Karens who need someone to bear witness to uncommon love.  

third culture kids and America first

Like most holidays, the Fourth of July is kind of a funny thing to try to celebrate when you are living in a different country. For us in the village, we are the only Americans for a good distance and I’m terrified of fireworks exploding in someone’s face, so my inclination is really to just let the day slip on by. I think I’m giving it greater consideration this year only because our oldest has recently become more aware of her American-ness and honestly, it has made our whole family pause a bit.

These are turbulent times in the Colvin house, to be frank. I don’t know why I expected smooth sailing forever. I mean, we are raising third culture kids, famous for their angst and exhaustive search for belonging. Wishful thinking maybe?

For six years, Bronwyn believed she was actually, ethnically, Zambian. Everything about her life would have told her so. After all, she has spent roughly 2,153 days doing typical Zam-kid things like eating nshima, climbing trees, dipping un-ripe mangos in salt and digging for rats after the fires go through. She’s never heard the Pledge of Allegiance or the Star Spangled Banner but she can sing the Zambian National Anthem flawlessly – Zambian accent and all! And what always made us chuckle is that, until recently, if you told her she wasn’t Zambian, she’d fight you. (She gets her feistiness from her father, obviously.)

I think my bio kids have always known they are a bit “different.” They get teased, laughed at, stared at, stroked – every form of unwanted attention possible. They get pulled into pictures with people they don’t know, asked to “perform” at random times, and get reminded often that their Bemba is noticeably a second language.

Their otherwise beautiful Zam-life – up in the trees, making banana stalk babies and rolling in the dirt – has always outweighed any sense of “other-ness.” They’ve always attributed negative experiences to the indiscretions of those who cause them… but never to their being American.

Until recently.

posing at the Chief's palace

Our family did a thing earlier this year where we sent mom to America for two months which apparently un-caged a multi-cultural bird that has desperately been waiting to fly. America has existed for our kids only as a figment of their imagination. Out of all of them, Bronwyn has spent the most time in that country – a whopping eleven months, actually, which transpired for her between the age of two and three – a time when a child’s memory is totally accurate, of course.

And so our beloved six year old’s recollection of her parent’s birthplace is basically Grandma and all of the benefits of living in her house, which includes, but is not limited to:

No set bedtime

The absence of the word ‘no’

Presents just because its Wednesday so why not

Bathing in an oversized tub under 18 inches of bubbles

Eating whipped cream out of the palm of her hand at 7 o’clock in the morning

Watching Micky Mouse for six hours a day while being served fruit and cheese on a tray

Etc., Etc., Etc.

And so when mom boarded that plane and went off to gallivant around the United States, it clicked for the first time in our eldest’s head that that was a thing. And once a trip to magic grandma-land was within the realm of possibility, it was a short jump in logic to start begging the question, Well then why in the name of all that is good and right in this world are we not all going there?

Because America is, in her unformed mind, a place of perfect and utter happiness, going there naturally became the knee jerk response to anything unpleasant.

You are making me eat my vegetables? Fine I’m going to America!

I have to do math? Fine! I’m going to America!

I don’t want to share with Leonie! I’m just going to America!

Not that that her declarations ever materialized for her – I mean, the child still ate her vegetables and did her math and had to share with her sister – all without boarding a 747. But still the magical possibility of escape to never-never land not only stayed alive but also grew in influence.

Feeling out of place in this environment combined with the known possibility of going to a “perfect” one, had the effect of pitting the two countries against one another. America could do no wrong and Zambia became the scape-goat for everything. All those little reminders that she’s “different” – once brushed off as other people’s bad manners – now became a dark spot for a whole nation. All of that third culture kid insecurity now had a perpetrator in her mind. Zambia was the problem; and so it followed that America would be the solution.

She started communicating those feelings in different ways. Boycotting chitenge dresses and refusing to curtsey before her elders and suddenly hating nshima. Her teachers told me that she’s racist because she got “sick” during Bemba period every day. Eventually she gave voice to her internal crisis, telling us directly, “I don’t belong here. I’m too different. I don’t feel like this is my land.” (My land? Who are you, Abraham and Lot?)

We sat outside one afternoon, Jeremy and I did, pondering if we had blown it all, ruined our first born by asking her to straddle an ocean, something that even we – with fully formed frontal lobes – fail to do perfectly. As we sat and talked, we watched our emotionally entangled child tangle herself up in a tree, chatting away (in Bemba, mind you) with three of her besties, and then come down and ask if they could all stay for dinner. She doesn’t hate this place like she thinks she does, we assured ourselves.

And thus begins a new phase of parenting for us. For the record, this is way more challenging than getting them to sleep through the night or learn to use the potty. This new stage of helping them navigate a world in which they belong everywhere and no where at the same time – light a candle for us.

We want our children to understand that loving one place need not require hating the other. Acknowledging our ties to America does not require rejection of Zambia. A love of nshima is not infidelity to hotdogs. And because the “I’m going to America” line is clearly unproductive, we’re finding new words, – something more healing and less toxic.

We started reciting every single day, sometimes with her teary face resting in between our hands, these truths:

There is hard everywhere.

There is good everywhere.

God loves absolutely every person on this planet the same.

And so we do too.

Go and chase beauty.

Go and be kind.

Every. Single. Day.

We speak the hard words, and she repeats them – less resistant all the time. A rewiring of synapses until her soul agrees with what her mouth obliges to say. And as we go on joy hunts and count our blessings, Zambia regains its good standing.

nshima and lounging with her favorite uncle emmanuel

On the flip side, we continue to deconstruct the well-supported myth that America is the land flowing with milk and honey. She hears us rant about ‘the state of America’ enough that she’s not totally clueless, but really most of it is above her. And yet, as Jeremy and I discuss the drama of our homeland juxtaposed with the drama of our family, the irony is not lost on us.

America as a whole is not entirely unlike my six year old. Both are trying to figure out who they are. Both are guilty of blaming the “other” for discomfort and trouble. Both are fighting to preserve a fictitious image of an America-past where everything is apparently rosy. Both have been convinced that a love of one necessitates a hatred of another. The definitions of culture have become muddled and nationality is a vague construct. The relational strain is more palpable than ever. The good times are gone.

Raising a nation is quite different than raising a child, so I focus on the three littles in my care and pray for the rest. All I know is that in our quest to produce happy, functional, morally responsible human beings, we take a hint from America’s present crisis and we pass the following conviction on to our kids in as many ways a possible:

You are citizens of heaven, and that changes everything.

Human decency demands we think about citizenship through an ethical lens, but our Christianity demands we think about it through a theological one as well. There is no sense in fighting for “our people” and against “their people” when our citizenship is not of this world anyway. There is no reason to love ourselves and hate the other when we are all “other” because heaven is our homeland. There is no logic in building a wall or locking others up and out when our cultural identity is wrapped up in Christ.

This is not about politics. This is about eschatology.

This fourth of July, we in the Colvin home will give a nod to history and heritage and we’ll probably wave like goofballs in the general direction of Grandma’s house. But there will be no celebration of nationalism or patriotism or ethno-centrism, because as long as we have life on this earth, we as a family declare that our home is in heaven. We can meaningfully sing, God bless America and Zambia and any other place we might dwell for a while. We want the best for the people of Mexico and Russia and Pakistan and every location on this glorious globe. Any other attitude belies our faith.

There is no such thing as America first for a people whose anthem is

Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be done.

Nothing else can help our third culture kids make sense of their weird experience on this planet until they grasp this beautiful truth. We can belong everywhere and nowhere because the third culture to which we really belong is other-worldly. Home is not Zambia, really, and it’s not America, really; it’s heaven, really, and heaven is forever.

Our existence between here and there is defined by how well we love every nation, tribe and people while we’re en route. C.S. Lewis in Till We Have Faces wrote, “No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.” It’s a small extrapolation then to say that you can rightly banish no man when you remember this is his city too.

I imagine God weeping bitterly as our ancestors drew fraudulent lines on a map and as proud men scrambled to claim more of it for themselves. And I imagine Clive Staples rolling over in his grave as his American brothers and sisters fight for the whiteness of their arbitrary territory.

We don’t get that angelic immigration stamp in our passports until the very end, but truly, we become better citizens of any country when we strive to make every place a little more heavenly. Jeremy and I pray that through our actions we preach this for our children again and again. Wherever we are, we welcome in every single person. Wherever we are, we seek peace for every single person. Wherever we are, we do justice to every single person. Wherever we are, we extend mercy to every single person.

This is not hardship, it’s the gospel.

Our children may always wrestle with place, identity, and the inherent awkwardness of being a third culture kid. When you eat nshima and pay in kwacha but read Beatrix Potter and watch the Lego movie you accept that all TCKs are a little eccentric. And through all the ups and downs, I pray they learn: the only way to live happily as a third-culture kid is to check the weight we give to our passports as we remember where we really, truly belong. 

Happy Fourth of July.