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. 

  

love languages in missions

Hickory Dickory Dock

The Zambian mouse ran up the clock.

The clock struck one

The mouse started running down... but then he stopped to talk to his neighbor for a while and three hours later he reached the bottom without feeling at all late…

Hickory Dickory Dock.

There, I fixed it.

One element of Zambian life that I’ve imperfectly chosen to embrace is that of time. Zam-time is enough to make even the super-relaxed white girl crazy. I mean really. I knew white people were uptight about time but I didn’t realize how clock-centered I am until Zambia beat every last bit of sensible time-orientation out of me. For years I showed up to church at 9:00 because every week, they announced that church would start at 9:00, and every week, I sat there by myself for over an hour until the church secretary (who the week before had said the words, “come at 9:00”) rolled in at 10:30 and asked me why I was there so early. I learned that my pace of “casual stroll” was basically a dead sprint as the people walking with me started wheezing while we walked together. And after a few dozen scheduling debacles, I accepted that when someone said they’d stop by for a minute, that the rest of my afternoon was shot as we would indeed be enjoying that minute for a few hours.

White privilege means that my clock-orientaiton is honored in most parts of the world but in rural Zambia I simply unclench my fists and accept a more fluid concept, which is, in many ways, a true gift. 

This gift of time has come into focus for me in the past several months as I feel like I have less of it now than ever before while also finding myself busied with some of the most time-consuming activities possible.

I don’t know exactly how it started, but for quite some time, I’ve basically been running a burn and wound clinic out of my house. We’ve long known that the clinic doesn’t really do burns or wound care. They will tend to you once, swabbing you down with bleach and wrapping you with gauze but Lord help you if that wound needs more than a day to heal because “once and done” is all you’re getting at the rural health center.

Some time back, a patient came to me with a massive wound that was getting no better and after begging for help, I agreed to care for it. This particular woman’s story found its way into village twitter and it became known that I possessed ointments and bandages and skills that actually prevented scaring and gave people their bodies back. The clinic knows this and lets me be, accepting that they can’t complain about my lack of official licensure when they aren’t willing to take over for me. And the patients keep coming. Recently, it has felt like as soon as one person gets better, someone else is wounded and we’re just blowing through sterile gauze and antiseptic ointment and literally hours of my day – every day – are now gone.

honest emotions as I wished for everyone to stop getting hurt

With a school to run, funds to raise, my own children to tend to... I still feel guilty saying that I don’t have hours to spend on this task; I hate that: that by virtue of my clock-centered complaining I somehow make light of what some of these people are enduring. By and large, these are not minor boo boos that need a band aid and a prayer. The majority of people who end up at my front door are there because they need intensive care and the government medical system has utterly failed them. If they were in a first-world country, many would be in burn units and ICUs. My house is, for at least some of them, a last stop before amputation.

its not pretty underneath

I have had to excuse myself from tending to a patient so that I can go and sob on Jeremy’s shoulder over the injustice and the medical malpractice that makes our front room better than the hospital. This should not be, and yet, sometimes it is. The time that this particular outreach takes up feels like it should be of no consideration to me, and yet, with everything else on my plate, it is.

The pain and the injustice and the guilt take their toll and so it meant something that at a particularly low point, a mom of a boy I had treated came back to me to say, J has been asking about you. He told me, “Mommy, Bethany really loves me.” This is the boy that screamed bloody murder every day for six weeks while the burns on his arm healed at a snails pace. He can now hold a pencil, and the grace in his words healed something in me.

this boy - he has spent more than his fair share of sick time with me, but the smile is how I know he's better.

Later, the mother of a child that scowled at me and pushed my hands away as I wiped weeks of dirt out of the filleted skin on his foot came back and said, “Every time we walk past your house, C looks up and smiles and when I ask him why he’s smiling he just says, that lady who loves me lives there.” And as if two rounds of Hallmark quality lovey comments weren’t enough, God gave me the gift of a third and then a fourth who said that word LOVE and I wondered if there wasn’t something to this.

The adults are less cheesy, but I’ve seen a similar affect. When the bandage changes are done and they want to sit and talk a while. When our kids start calling them grandma and missing them when they aren’t there. Every visit hurts, physically, but there’s a deeper healing at work too and all present can sense it.

daily snuggles with grandma, before and after dressing changes are good for both of them.

Despite the fact that I continue to pray through every bandaging and treatment session, “Lord, heal them quickly – for their sake and mine” the un-asked for bi-product of the daily care and the daily concern is that it communicates love in ways that a once-and-done couldn’t have.

to make you feel extra cared for, the babies will put bandaids on your perfectly healthy skin too. 

I’ve spent the last 12 years trying my best to love people. That’s our mission statement in a nutshell. And if I really assess our work properly, our best programs and projects are the ones that afford us the opportunity to spend concerted amounts of time with people. When an area of our work puts us in front of the same people day after day, there is a love language being spoken and clearly heard.

Twenty six years ago, Gary Chapman taught us all that there are different love languages and that if you really want someone to feel loved, you have to speak their language. After the six hundredth super-long chat around someone’s fire or even just standing in the bush path, Jeremy and I started joking that it felt like all Zambians possessed the love language “quality time.” And after logging hundreds more hours spending time with people in the burn and wound arena, I’d say that yeah, it probably is. There is nothing efficient about loving someone through the time it takes for a third degree burn over ten percent of the body to heal, but in terms of communicating love, the relational investment trumps my productivity every single day.

waiting for pain meds to kick in with the distraction of America's Got Talent
(we've watched all of the Zambian gospel YouTube videos already.)

The western world historically has “loved” poorer, third world nations with money. It’s fast, its easy, and above all, super efficient. Even amongst overseas workers, there still exists a mentality of “present the gospel, move on” or in development-worker speak, “dump and run.” We make up for in material gifts what we aren’t willing to give in time. And suddenly, the mission field sounds really noisy.

First Corinthains 13 says that if you don’t have love, you are a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. I think that if we, the west, take an honest look at our programmatic efforts, even those that try to be gospel centric, we’d have to admit that the love language of the recipient has not been considered.

If spending quality time with people is the greatest act of love in this context, then I wonder if 1 Corinthians 13 could stand an update:

If I speak an African tribal language, but am too busy to love with my time, I am a clanging cymbal.

If I plant churches and build schools at all over but am too busy to love with my time, I am nothing.

If I sacrifice my American comforts and move my family to the bush but am too busy to love with my time, then I gain nothing.

Love is patient with those who want to be with us; 

love does not boast of how busy she is;

it is not arrogant or rude in needing to do “more important” things;

it does not insist on getting back to work;

it is not irritable when things take too long or resentful of lost hours;

it does not make light of the hospitals shortcomings, but rejoices in best-practices; 

love bears tears and the blood;

believes that God is good;

hopes that healing will come;

endures the pain when it all takes time.

Love never ends. As for development, it’ll fall apart; as for workshops, they will cease; as for sermons they will pass away. … So now faith, hope and love abide, but the great of these is love through time.

I still struggle with feeling inadequate – not accomplishing what I need to and feeling like I’m coming up short in every area. And I still hate that so much of my time is going to medical care that isn’t my field of expertise nor really – in the grand scheme of things – my responsibility. But for every person, to step into that space, and allow me to place hands on tender spots for weeks on end in order to see them heal and enjoy their body again  – the process that takes so much care and so much time – if that is what it means to love, then bless it.

the real reason missionaries don't stop

I lay flat on my back, unwilling to disrupt the IV awkwardly placed in the crook of my left arm. I inhaled – slow and intentional – a barely-there blood pressure not allowing for much vigor. I stared vaguely at the ceiling – white particle boards stained by drip spots. I closed my eyes and let go the words: “this is so nice.”

I caught that thought mid air before it had a chance to float very far. Then, talking back to myself, a revealing conversation followed.

Me: I’m sorry… what? Sickly in a third-world hospital, in no way classifies as “nice.”

Also me: Yeah, but no one is expecting me to do anything other than breathe. And that feels so good.

Me: …

Also me: Dear God, how did I get here.

I would spend the next six weeks in recovery: physical, mental and emotional. My goals were getting my organs back into the range of “alive” and psychologically unpacking the twisted relief I had clearly found in hospitalization.

The lead up to the breakdown should have been predictable.

We’d been on the field for three and a half years without a meaningful break. We were trying to adopt: a logistical and emotional battle we never foresaw. We were expanding our ministry: a spiritual and mental battle we foresaw, but still. Three kids, two in diapers: enough said. Malaria: times seven. A season of grueling meetings with no conclusions. Midnight wake up calls. Other people’s needs. Mom guilt. Bureaucracy. Police Corruption. Loneliness. Exhaustion.

Despite being a recipe more obvious than a pb&j, it still caught me by surprise. After all, burnout is something that happens to other people. And yet I was apparently oblivious to the dwindling fire within. I kept putting on my brave face, telling myself and others , Yes this is hard. But it’s a season. I can do anything for a season. So I kept going. Always ramping up. Never letting down… But the season wore on, and my humanity –  ie the part that can’t lie – ran out of flame.

In my weeks of recovery, I accepted responsibility for my self-care failure. I was clearly beyond tired – which only happens to those who never stop. But why, exactly, had I failed to stop? I honestly didn’t know.

I set my mind to unpacking my mess. The habit of rest hinges on conviction, doesn’t it? I had solid theology on this point: God gives sleep to those He loves, and the Sabbath earned a spot in the Top Ten for a reason. Furthermore, I had read and accepted the research that proves that setting aside work and recharging properly improves not only happiness but also work performance. And yet… a stumbling block in the way of life-giving rest clearly remained.

After my discharge from the hospital, Jeremy, in his good-husbandness, packed up our family and took us to the capital so that I could get some advanced medical care and heal in a place where no one was demanding my participation. During that time, we received a call from one of the pastors in Mansa who was checking in on my progress. He said to Jeremy, “Tell Bethany not to even think about us. She needs to be well.” And as I heard his voice through the phone at Jeremy’s ear, the dammed up tears of a decade forced their escape. While Jeremy hung up and pulled me in for the hug, I found the words that explained my emotion: he gave me permission.

Permission to stop. Permission to withdraw. Permission to let go completely.

That phone call revealed a crucial felt need. Pastor Bwalya’s words were a healing balm on a wound that’s been festering for a third of my life – as long as I’ve been in Africa. And finally I realized more clearly that, even as I receive permission to rest from God above, and hold tight to self-granted permission within, I still consistently struggle with the lack of permission from a very important third party: other people, and specifically, “the donors.” 

Be gentle with my soul as I bare it for you here, dear friends. For those of you reading this who support missions – and in particular, support us – this is neither a guilt trip nor an accusation. It is purely honest. You need to know that I’m coming out of a very crowded missionary closet when I confess that there is a tension between finding the rest that we need and meeting the expectations of our donors.

My burnout story is not unique – which is part of what makes it so important to tell. There is a legitimate crisis in our modern missions culture as defined by missionaries who do not feel free to retreat from their work for the purpose of self-care without judgment and or financial consequence from those we depend on. 

The tricky thing about this topic is that any descent Christian would encourage their missionaries in keeping the Sabbath – so long as it’s not more than one day and it’s not away from home – ie, it doesn’t look like vacation. I’ve talked with our missionary friends about what this means in reality - how the implied constraints on Sabbath rest are so destructive that “Sabbath” often ceases to be Sabbath at all.

To give you an idea, Jeremy and I Sabbath at home weekly. It usually looks like a “peaceful” day starting with pancakes, followed by a three hour church service in a foreign language in 90 degree heat, followed by a late lunch with overly-exhausted kids who eventually will snap-and-nap (bless it), at which point the adults might try and relax by reading a book or watching a movie, during which we will  be interrupted a mere sixty-seven times by neighbor boys wanting to borrow a soccer ball, pregnant women wanting a baby hat, someone with a nasty wound needing a bandage and young men looking for work. The evening will be spent solving the crises that only happen after dark and apparently can’t wait 12 more hours. Throughout this day, shutting the phone off and closing the door is out of the question. The callers will always send a child to ask us in person why our phone is off and if we try and ignore him, said child will stand outside and yell our names until we open the door. (Record yelling time: 37 minutes. Not one thing will dissuade the child who knows you're in there, my friends.) We try and hurry these interruptions along so we can get back to our peace, but alas: African time. And so, most Sabbath days, we can’t wait to go to bed so that we can rest from our rest. Lovely.   

Certainly, different missionaries have different living and working situations, allowing for different amounts of “closing out work” for the sake of rest and proper self-care. But a significant portion of missionaries around the globe have determined through trial and error (and hospitalization) that the only way to truly recharge in a way that is healthy and holy is to literally LEAVE –  which is a scenario most Americans have a hard time relating to. The idea that “home” would be anything but a haven sounds unnatural.

It's the lack of division between work and life for missionaries that makes “Sabbath on the field” extremely difficult to achieve. Our proximity to the pressing needs, the interruptions at the door and phone calls reminding us of the problems we have not yet solved – even  sights and sounds themselves that keep the mind in the “on” position. For many, Sabbath in the village – or island/jungle/city/wherever they serve – isn’t Sabbath.

It just isn't.

Some missionaries have explained that expecting them to “stay home and rest” feels kind of like expecting a surgeon to Sabbath in the waiting room of the ER. It’s like asking a factory worker to heal without stepping away from the assembly line. It’s telling a soldier to take a nap in the middle of the battle field.

And so the word to the wise is that sometimes you have to get away… which unfortunately to outsiders looks an awful lot like a vacation.

church meme committee nailed it

We know missionaries who are criticized for Sabbathing at a “resort” because that’s literally the only place to go where the water won’t kill them… Missionaries drawing heat for flying somewhere to Sabbath because the country next door is cheaper…. And all African missionaries’ personal favorite, the subtly snarky: “Gee, I wish I could go on safari for my Sabbath.” (Side note: You can, America. It’s called the zoo.) The fact of the matter is that many missionaries have figured out exactly what it takes for them to find real rest, but it’s the negative feedback that keeps many from even bothering to try.

To be fair, opinions on how missionaries should use their time and money is absolutely a spectrum with as much diversity as my six year old's style.

But disapproval of missionaries resting away from home squarely rests at the top of the opinion bell curve. This is one of those “off the record” covos your missionary friends are having amongst themselves. Precious few have been bold enough to pull back the curtain and reveal their own journey but if you read those who have, you’ll notice a common theme: their words feel risky – scandalous even – as they share their stories. The pieces I've appreciated include:

ten things your missionary won't tell you (hone in on number six)
the day the missionaries went on vacation
missionaries are supposed to suffer... so am i allowed to eat lobster?

There’s not a ton of published material on this topic - compliments of its taboo status. And in case you can’t blog hop right now, I’ll share a handful of comments we’ve either heard said to others or personally received over the years.

“We don’t pay you to go on vacation. We pay you to do ministry.”
 “I don’t think its right for you to go on vacation if we can’t afford to.”
 “You’re going on vacation? Maybe don’t tell anyone.”
 “We thought our missionaries were responsible... until we found out they went on vacation!”

Depending on how you personally feel about missionaries taking vacation, you’re probably either saying “amen” or “ouch” or “wowza” but let me reiterate that these are typical sentiments driving missionary families either to the brink of exhaustion or into actual hiding… and the results are not something to be proud of. Do a little research on missionary burnout, trauma in missions, mental health and missionaries or other related topics and you’ll quickly see how deep this rabbit hole goes. (I recommend getting lost for a while on Sarita Hartz's blog for some of the most thoughtful pieces in this genre.)

I believe that most mission supporters have strong feelings about this topic because it wrangles not one but two of America’s most precious commodities – time and money. Particularly in white American culture, it is not acceptable to waste either. Giving money to support church planting, clean water or outreach to children will make many a donor-heart sing, while funding the missionaries to sit on a beach and watch the lapping waves produces frowns. But missionary care is never a waste, and this is where a shift in missions culture needs to happen.

Wayne Muller in his book, Sabbath exposes the negative impact of serving apart from Sabbath rest. “We are a nation of hectic healers, refusing to stop,” Muller writes. “Our drive to do better faster, to develop social programs more rapidly, to create helpful agencies more quickly can create a sea of frantic busyness with negligible, even questionable results. In our passionate rush to be helpful, we miss things that are sacred, subtle and important.”

The western church-missions culture would benefit substantially from appreciating that when funds are responsibly used for the sake of missionary R&R, it has the effect of amplifying effectiveness in literally every other realm. Spend some to get much more is not waste – it’s wise. The economics of human resources decrees that we need to keep our people in tip-top shape in order to achieve maximum output.

I can hear a distant amen from my missionary friends across the web. We know experientially that busy, fatigued, harried service does not draw out our best. We know – even intuitively – that if we could just step out of it all for a time, we’d be able to come back and serve better, which is our hearts desire.

While Muller speaks exhortation to those who refuse to stop, I feel a great sympathy for all of the missionaries who simply fear to. Many are afraid because they experienced the push back once and vowed never to do it again. Others are afraid simply by the perceived disapproval that seems to float in the air. Regardless, I believe that it is vitally important for both the senders and the goers to join hearts and commit to self-care, soul-care and Sabbath rest.

We, the missionaries, need to stop sheltering our supporters from important truths about our work environment, the pressures, and our need for release. We need to stop our work – and leave home if need be – not hiding our actions in the closet thereby perpetuating the myth of the super hero missionary who never takes a break. 

And as for the broader church culture, we need to stop praising missionaries who over-produce, and we certainly need to stop leveraging financial power to reward those who never stop while withdrawing support from those who do.

When we get this right, I have a feeling that kingdom efforts the world over will find for themselves eagles wings.