Yo kiddos,
Why the random influx of blogs, you ask? Well, when you have time to reflect on your trip for three days, and then have no internet access, things happen. Thus, unless I wanted to watch a Hindi game show involving shoots and ladders, I wrote up blogs.
Here, I’m going to write briefly about the experience of the population known as “Third Culture Kids,” i.e., those children raised by parents from one culture, and live in a different culture. Basically, every missionary child, though not limited to these. For example, if a businesswoman from the U.S. and her husband were forced to move oversea, say to Egypt, their children would be Third Culture Kids. Why third, when there’s only two? Because they seem to occupy a place unto themselves, a middle space between the two which somehow becomes a third culture unto themselves, such that they don’t completely fit in either their parents’ homeland or the environment in which their family resides.
As personalities vary, children can have different perceptions of the experience. It is awkward for anyone, but it is not necessarily negative. The experience of children born into missional contexts, for example, often go into missions themselves, whether in the environment they were raised or another entirely, as was the case of the grown children of an older couple at LAMB.
Others, however, do take it hard. One time during PE (what a glorious subject!), one of the expat children faced a misunderstanding with his Bangladeshi peers, and sat off to the sidelines, moping. I walked up to him, thinking he was angry about the game, only to hear him voice his concern about how he never felt at home any place. In Bangladesh, he was always the “bideshi,” the foreigner, the outsider, but in the nation his parents were from, he was seen as a Bengali, one of the people of Bangladesh. I counseled him as much as I could, asked him to seek his identity in God, and then returned to supervising dodgeball… where another expat child was having a great deal of fun.
The incident caused me to reflect a good deal about what I would have for my own children in missions. I pray I would be more than willing to get up, stick a nail in my sinful flesh, and go to the ends of the earth to follow God. I would hope the same for my future wife. But for my children, who have no choice in the matter, how should I counsel them? How should I point them toward Christ, as I had not been raised with such torn allegiances culturally? I do not take this as a reason to avoid the mission field. However, my kneecaps should wear down a bit more for them as they discover within themselves a third culture.
In a sense, I suppose we as Christians all are in this state: Kingdom children far from our native land of heaven, somehow occupying this foreign land called earth. Of course, we do not adopt the ways of this world, but we are still confused as to how we act in the world without becoming of the world. The tension is awkward, but we know the One who shapes our identities out in spite of it. He is the One who draw us into this strange dance between two worlds until we are at last home.
Peace in Christ [yet sehnsucht until then],
MJW
Why the random influx of blogs, you ask? Well, when you have time to reflect on your trip for three days, and then have no internet access, things happen. Thus, unless I wanted to watch a Hindi game show involving shoots and ladders, I wrote up blogs.
Here, I’m going to write briefly about the experience of the population known as “Third Culture Kids,” i.e., those children raised by parents from one culture, and live in a different culture. Basically, every missionary child, though not limited to these. For example, if a businesswoman from the U.S. and her husband were forced to move oversea, say to Egypt, their children would be Third Culture Kids. Why third, when there’s only two? Because they seem to occupy a place unto themselves, a middle space between the two which somehow becomes a third culture unto themselves, such that they don’t completely fit in either their parents’ homeland or the environment in which their family resides.
As personalities vary, children can have different perceptions of the experience. It is awkward for anyone, but it is not necessarily negative. The experience of children born into missional contexts, for example, often go into missions themselves, whether in the environment they were raised or another entirely, as was the case of the grown children of an older couple at LAMB.
Others, however, do take it hard. One time during PE (what a glorious subject!), one of the expat children faced a misunderstanding with his Bangladeshi peers, and sat off to the sidelines, moping. I walked up to him, thinking he was angry about the game, only to hear him voice his concern about how he never felt at home any place. In Bangladesh, he was always the “bideshi,” the foreigner, the outsider, but in the nation his parents were from, he was seen as a Bengali, one of the people of Bangladesh. I counseled him as much as I could, asked him to seek his identity in God, and then returned to supervising dodgeball… where another expat child was having a great deal of fun.
The incident caused me to reflect a good deal about what I would have for my own children in missions. I pray I would be more than willing to get up, stick a nail in my sinful flesh, and go to the ends of the earth to follow God. I would hope the same for my future wife. But for my children, who have no choice in the matter, how should I counsel them? How should I point them toward Christ, as I had not been raised with such torn allegiances culturally? I do not take this as a reason to avoid the mission field. However, my kneecaps should wear down a bit more for them as they discover within themselves a third culture.
In a sense, I suppose we as Christians all are in this state: Kingdom children far from our native land of heaven, somehow occupying this foreign land called earth. Of course, we do not adopt the ways of this world, but we are still confused as to how we act in the world without becoming of the world. The tension is awkward, but we know the One who shapes our identities out in spite of it. He is the One who draw us into this strange dance between two worlds until we are at last home.
Peace in Christ [yet sehnsucht until then],
MJW
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