Buried in one of our photo albums is a picture of our 4-month-old son, Lee, on the eve of our departure from South Africa. The year was 1980. Ursula and I were packing our suitcases for Jamaica, following our call to mission. My brother had laid Lee in one of the suitcases. He was part of what we were taking with us on our journey in mission.
We were by turns excited and daunted about what lay ahead. We only vaguely apprehended then, the impact our choice would have on the baby in the suitcase. Our time in Jamaica flew quickly by. Lee took it all in, mostly without our even noticing how he was being changed, other than our observations of his physical increase, intellectual growth, and the development of his social skills.
Five years later, from our new home in Pasadena, California, we found Lee crying in a closet. We heard, “Oh, God, they’re throwing away bread when the children are starving.” When we opened the closet door to speak with him, he was biting into the bread between heartrending sobs. No matter that the bread, left on a table for missionary families after the expiry date had been reached, was stale and unpalatable. (Ursula and I knew. We tried it, confirmed that both descriptions were true, before we put it into the garbage can where Lee found it.)
In Jamaica, we lived in close proximity to poverty and struggle. The idea of waste was scandalous. Too many people were hungry and nothing that could be salvaged was discarded. Lee noticed.
During Lee’s first five years, values were being formed in him that moved him to care about those who are vulnerable and disadvantaged. Later, when he graduated from college, compelled by a desire to respond to those who were hurting, Lee worked at an AIDS ministry in center-city Philadelphia. After six years of showing compassion and experiencing love, he decided to quit that job in order to go to medical school so he could better help people with AIDS. Today, as a doctor, he can’t wait to pay off his loans and go to southern Africa to aid in the healing of those who suffer.
When families are in mission together, they experience an alternative universe and have their values shaped, or reshaped, by the context of their service. In that experience, they companion each other and grow together toward better understandings of themselves and of the world. Hopefully, they are also motivated by those values to move toward better action. In their shared experience, they are able to offer each other support and even inspiration as they cross frontiers that demand courage and openness. Together, they are given the amazing opportunity and gift to unwrap the surprises that God has lovingly packed into the journey that mission workers are invited to take.
Decades later, our family is still uncovering blessings and surprises that God bundled into our suitcases when our family left the familiar and went with God to the place we believed we were called to go.
