I recently discovered a meme about stress and then modified to be about cross-cultural missionaries. I took this new meme (which you'll find at the end of this post) and shared on social media because I thought that many of my fellow missionaries could relate to it. Many could. No matter where you live, life can be difficult. But there are numerous additional stress factors in the lives of cross-cultural missionaries that people rarely experience unless they live outside their home country for an extended period of time.
What particular stresses do missionaries experience? Imagine the following:
- Doing everything you already do in your everyday life, but do it in a second language that you had to learn as an adult, starting in maybe your 20s or 30s. Even though you may now understand that language fairly well, you often don’t understand 100% of what people are saying and you don’t know how to say 100% of what you want to express.
- Next, you’re doing your normal life in a culture where people have different ideas than you (and the people who grew up with) about what it means to be on time, how to solve relational issues, ideas of how or what should have authority, and whether communication should direct or indirect, verbal or not verbal. Oh, and the values and expectations of the community at large are different from where you grew up.
- More than 50% of the stores and products you are familiar with are not available. There are other similar shops and products but they are not quite the same.
- You are always viewed as an outsider and transient.
- To simply remain living where you are and doing what you do, you have to annually (or more often) submit a ream of paperwork (with official stamps from multiple branches of bureaucracy) together with fees for you and all members of your family in order to have permission to stay where you are and do what you do. And don’t be too quick to think about quitting your job and getting another one because your permission to stay in the country is tied to that particular job.
The above list of stress factors particular to the mission life could be expanded to include a lot more, but the above list gives you an idea.
If you know a missionary, pray for them today to be able to
- manage stress,
- find outlets for relaxation and refreshment
- always look to God for all that they need to get through the day and also do effective ministry.
And if you had the discipline and interest to read the introductory paragraphs, congratulations. You are a highly literate learner. Most people just scroll down for the funny meme. I love reading but I confess, if I was reading this post instead of writing it, I probably would have gone for the meme first.
One of the internal debates in the world of evangelical missions is whether the missionary call extends to the whole family or to just the parents. I’ve written previously on why both husband and wife (and not just the husband) must be committed to mission work, so in this post I want to think a bit about the kids. Does the missionary call extend to them as well?
If I were living in my home country, and I answered a call to pastor a church there, my wife would need to be supportive, but the pastoral call would be to me, not to her. Likewise, the pastoral call would not be to my kids, but to me. Hopefully my kids would be okay with their dad being a pastor but whether I were a pastor or a carpenter or a salesman, our family could largely carry on with our regular activities and patterns of life that we were accustomed to. We’d be using the same language and living in the same culture that we had been. If we had to move to a different part of the country, that would obviously be difficult for the kids in terms of moving house, leaving friends, and more. I don’t want to ignore the fact that domestic moves come with heartache too but when compared to moving overseas, there is a lot more that changes for kids.
Image by kalhh from Pixabay
When dad and mom decide to move to the mission field, the kids don’t have much of a choice because the whole family needs to go. Depending upon the age of the kids, it may be necessary to discuss the decision with them before a final decision is made, but at the end of the day, the kids don’t decide. The parents do. If the kids are young, they may not really understand what is happening or what that means for them. If you have very young kids, it is physically more difficult to move (i.e. dragging stroller and car seats through multiple airports), but emotionally it may be easier because the kids barely understand where they are going or where they have been. As long as they have mom and dad, food, and toys, they are good to go anywhere. That is probably an oversimplification but I think there is much truth to it. When kids get to be teenagers, they can actually carry their own luggage, manage themselves on the airplane, help you move furniture, make food for themselves, etc. Moving and getting settled in a new place with older kids is physically much easier. But when they are older, it is harder for the kids emotionally because they are starting to have opinions and convictions about what they want and what they don’t want, including the pluses and minuses of moving. Leaving behind friends, pets, and favorite activities can be difficult and traumatic. It is tough to move from a context where they know the culture and can express themselves (and understand others) easily in their native language. Teens are just starting to get their feet under them and become confident in their ability to interact with the world outside the home as they head towards adulthood. Moving overseas often bumps them back down to the level of a young child in terms of their ability to do things for themselves and communicate with people outside the home.
Kids are still growing and changing physically, emotionally, and spiritually and it is too much to expect that kids of missionary parents will have the same conviction and commitment to sharing the Gospel as their parents do. Part of discipling your kids is helping them to understand the “what” and “why” of sharing Christ with others as they understand what it means for them personally to follow Christ. And some kids of Christian parents, in all walks of life, go through periods where they are not interested in spiritual things. Some come out of that and become young adults with a firm faith in Christ. Some don’t.
With these realities in mind, does a missionary call extend to the whole family, including the kids? They answer is both yes and no. Let me explain. If we mean that the kids are expected to be little evangelists just like the parents, I would say no. We can hope and pray that they would want to share Christ with others as they understand and embrace Christ as their Lord and Savior, but we should not expect more of them spiritually than we would if dad and mom were doing some other profession in their home country. But because cross-cultural missions usually involves the whole family uprooting and moving into an area with a different language and culture, I would say yes. The family is a unit and it moves together to the mission field. If God has placed a call upon the parents to cross-cultural service, then that includes the kids because everyone has to move and adjust. This involves both blessings and heartaches for everyone in the family, whether it be parents or kids. Parents should be able to say to their kids, “God has called our family to the mission field” as a way of helping them understand that God views the family as a unit that sticks together, moves together, and helps one another. Parents need to do all they can to raise their children to trust and follow God (Deuteronomy 6:4-9, Proverbs 22:6, Psalm 78:1-4) and to be sensitive to their particular needs (Ephesians 6:4), but the kids also need to honor and respect the parents authority (Deuteronomy 5:6, Ephesians 6:1-3) as they try to obey God as best they know how.
The call to missions does not look the same for the parents as it does for the kids but the missionary family is all in it together as they live, study, work, and play in a foreign culture with a different language. There are joys but also heartaches as families work through together what it looks like to live and thrive in the place that God has put them. If you know a missionary family with kids, pray for them today.
In late January 2024, traveling preacher Cindy Jacobs is speaking at a large event in Chiang Mai, Thailand. What she will say this time remains to be seen but at the end of 2008, a lot of Christians in Thailand (both Thai and missionaries) got excited about Cindy Jacobs' prophecy of an imminent coming revival in Thailand. The text of that prophecy has since been removed from her website, but you can still find her 2008 prophecy online courtesy of the Wayback Machine. Jacobs prophesied:
“Look to South Thailand. Revival is beginning to burn in South Thailand... In 2009, it will begin. In 2010, Fire begins in fullblown. 2010-2020, I will fill this nation. More churches will be planted, more than in all the years before...Prepare in 2009 with Daniels and Josephs bringing about market place revival...You have one year (2009) to prepare for the Decade of the Harvest. Prepare regional evangelists. There will be revival in all sectors, great transfer of wealth, wisdom and revelation.”
 Prophecies like this are very exciting because there are still so few Christians in Thailand (less than 1% of the population) and everyone wants to see revival. It is thrilling to think that God is telling us that the very thing that we have desired for many years is about to happen. And there are good things happening in the Thai church. People are coming to faith. The church is growing.
But Jacobs' propehcy claims that a great revival was supposed to start in Thailand in 2009 and then progressively fill the nation between 2010-2020. As of January 2024, the latest statistics on Protestant Christians and churches (broadly speaking, this includes evangelical, charismatic, Pentecostal, etc.) show the following:
Protestant Christianity in Thailand
| Country Population |
65,729,098 |
| Total Christians |
497,867 |
| Total Churches |
8,552 |
| Percent Christian |
0.76% |
Based on the numbers above, has revival come? Did revival fill the nation between 2010 and 2020 like Jacobs' claimed that God told her? If revival has already happened, praise the Lord. If it has not yet occurred, what does that say about the reliability of this claimed prophet?
“When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously.” (Deuteronomy 18:22)
The Thai language has an endless number of words related to emotions that use the word jai, or “heart.” And since most Thai are concerned about saving face (and losing face!), one of the common “heart” words is noi joi, which roughly translates as feeling slighted, hurt, or overlooked.
Have you ever felt slighted? At one time or another, all of us have felt unhappy and hurt because someone overlooked us or did not give us credit. Even though we have knowledge, position, and dignity, someone fails to give us the honor that we are due. We are someone that others should respect and honor, but instead they dishonor and disrespect us. Don't they know who I am?!
 Image by rafiq23 from Pixabay
They might not know who we are. They might not know where we went to school. They might not know about our experience or expertise in one area or another. Maybe they think we did something wrong when we know that we were in the right. And even worse than that, maybe they know who we are, but they have intentionally chosen to disrespect us, deride us, blame us, and criticize us in front of other people. We have lost face. When someone does that to us, it feels awful. We feel slighted, upset, and hurt because we know that we are better than that. We are better and smarter than other people are willing to admit.
When other people overlook and disrespect us, we often think that we have good reason to feel slighted. We feel like we have a good reason to get angry. We have a good reason to get revenge, insult, or explode on someone in a rage of emotion… don’t we? God tells us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves but we don’t feel like loving some neighbors because they slighted us. But do we really have good reason to feel this way? In this post, I want to tell you about a certain person who had more reason than anyone else in the history of the world to get upset because he was slighted… but he didn’t do so. That person is Jesus Christ.
When the Son of God was still in heaven with his Father, an innumerable number of angels continually bowed down and worshipped him. Every spirit in heaven worshipped Him because they all knew and acknowledged his holiness and greatness. The Son was worthy of all worship, and no one overlooked him. When he was in heaven, the Son of God had a very comfortable existence. His glory was always acknowledged and exalted.
But when the Son of God the Father came into this world and born as a man, there were very few who knew who he was and acknowledged his greatness. The apostle John explained, “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.” (John 1:10-11). When Jesus was in this world, most people overlooked his beauty, his greatness, his honor, and his glory. The Jewish leaders criticized and disdained him again and again. But Jesus never got upset because he felt slighted. He never got annoyed with other people because they were not honoring him as befits his status as the Son of God.
When Jesus was still in heaven, he braced himself to enter into a world that was going to constantly overlook his glory, look down on him, and mock him. When Jesus was overlooked and insulted, what kind of attitude and reaction did he have towards other people? The apostle Paul explained that though Jesus “was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (Phil. 2:6-8)
Jesus is infinitely good and without blemish. He is worthy of the highest honor because he created the world and is over all. Jesus is therefore the only person in the history of the world who really has a reason to get upset because he has been slighted. As for us, we are sinners whose actions are often good and evil mixed together. We often feel slighted because we regard ourselves too highly and think we are better than other people. But we don’t have nearly as much reason to feel slighted as Jesus did. Yet Jesus didn’t get upset or annoyed with those who dishonored him. Instead of being indignant, Jesus humbled himself and served us. Jesus was more interested in the honor that comes from God than the honor that comes from man. This is the reason why Jesus did get upset at being slighted and overlooked.
During this Christmas season and throughout the year, let us remember just how much Jesus humbled himself in order to redeem us from pride, selfish ambition and conceit. We are sinners worthy of judgment. But instead of condemnation, we have received grace. Even if we are sometimes overlooked or insulted, Jesus was overlooked and insulted so much more than us. Let us follow Jesus’ example. Instead of getting upset, angry, or annoyed at being slighted, let us humble ourselves and entrust ourselves to God who will lift up and honor everyone deserving of honor at the right time.
Returning to Thailand after a long time away, my family and I have had a lot more government related paperwork and encounters with government offices and officials than we have had in a long time. This has especially been true for visa applications and immigration related tasks as we’ve left the U.S. and come in and out of Thailand and Malaysia before finally coming into Thailand with the right kind of visas. We’re not done yet though, because even though we are back in Thailand on the right visas, a work permit needs to be applied for and additional paperwork and address verifications need to be accomplished certain tasks, such as buying a vehicle.
 Royal Thai Consulate General, Penang, Malaysia
Once all this initial paperwork and bureaucracy is settled, there will be annual visa renewals for the whole family in order to retain permission to stay in Thailand. We’re thankful for our mission organization’s staff to help guide us through the paperwork, and for the advice and experience of missionary friends, colleagues, and people on internet forums, but there is always a cloud of uncertainty and tenuousness that hangs over the whole process. Do we have ALL the right documents? Are we missing something? Will the official examining our docs require something previously unknown? Will the official give us the right stamp with the right date? Are our photos to the exact specifications that this particular government office requires (which may be different than another government office)? The right to stay in our host country can never be assumed. We are always here by the good graces of the government of our host country, a status that can be revoked at any time. The situation in Thailand is not nearly as tenuous as some places but there is always uncertainty that presses me to turn to God.
As I’ve applied and renewed visas and gone through immigration checkpoints time and time again over the years, a Bible verse that often comes to mind is Proverbs 21:1, “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will.” In the human sphere, governments and their officials have sovereignty over their domains. They have power and authority to give individuals the “yea” or “nay” and their word is final, especially for those who are foreigners. However, this world and all its peoples are ultimately under the rule of God who created the heavens and the earth. The proverb quoted above teaches us that if God wishes to direct a human authority or government in a certain direction, He can make that happen. In terms of immigration status, if God wants my family and I to live and serve in a certain country, then He can guide the relevant officials and offices to grant that permission. This does not mean that I can be cavalier about getting paperwork in order. I must do my best to respect the authority of the relevant officials and government agents. But at the end of the day, remembering this proverb and the ultimate sovereignty of God over all things helps me to be less anxious and afraid when approaching and interacting with the powers that be.
I still struggle with all the “what if...?!” fears about what could happen if we don’t get approved, if we are missing a document, or if we meet an official who decides to make life difficult for us for some reason. But all of this uncertainty can be a good thing because it forces me to turn to God and remember that all our times are in His hands, that He is good, and He does what is good and best. So, whether we receive the desired government approvals or not, God is still in control and is actively directing our lives as He desires. God will bring us to where He wants us to be.
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