There’s a lot of discussion among certain parts of the church at the moment about ‘becoming’ missional. And in the process of reading these discussions I’ve been learning a ton, which I'm hoping to blog about in the next few days and weeks. But the more I think on it and reflect on it, I realize I am very fortunate – I’ve
grown up missional to a certain extent, and I was also
prepared to be missional by the experiences life threw at me from a very early age.
Let me explain.
B.H. - Before HeatherSome 30+ years ago, my parents – two wet-behind-the-ears, just-out-of-college kids had just moved up to Edmonton, Alberta, from Spokane, Washington. They had been married for a couple of years, and my dad was working part time at two different schools as a music teacher to try to make ends meet. After about a year-and-a-half of teaching grade seven and eight band (!) to what were largely new immigrant-filled schools, my parents were asked by their church to attend a missions conference being held in Edmonton. Which they duly did. There they decided that they were called to missions, so they went seeking after the right missions agency. Out of the available choices, my two musically minded parents saw two options:
1. Travel to Africa and translate hymns into Swahili (or some such assignment); or:
2. Join Campus Crusade for Christ’s Music Ministry.
My parents chose the later, and went off for training. Their first team was based in the Vancouver area, which is where I was born. A few months before I was born, their team traveled to the Toronto area, where my mother made the fateful error of telling God that she would live ‘anywhere but here’. Well, let’s just say that I was only nine months old when we moved to Toronto!
A Miraculous ExistenceIn between having their first baby and moving halfway across the country, my parents spent much of their waking moments with a very sick baby. I was born with clubfoot, a congenital birth defect. Shortly after birth, while my father was in Korea with Campus Crusade, I developed intestinal bleeding. By the time he returned, I was hospitalized and pronounced in danger of death, as the doctors could not trace the source of my problems. My parents went out into the hospital grounds and prayed for three hours. When they returned, my fever was gone, my bleeding was gone, and I have never had such problems since. I remember hearing this story in full when I was about 13, and realizing then that God had a plan for my life – that He was in control, and writing a story to suit Himself and His purposes.
At four months of age, I was readmitted to hospital for surgery to correct the clubfoot. This time things went anything but right, and an operation meant to cure only injured, resulting in a childhood and adolescence full of pain and operations. Again, I always had a very keen sense that there was a greater purpose to all of this – even as a very small child – a knowledge that somehow this was part of God’s plan.
Moving AroundIn transferring to Toronto, my parents also transferred from the music ministry to the campus ministry, and began working at the University of Toronto – the most multi-cultural university on the planet.
When I was three we moved again – this time to work at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. My little brother was born three weeks after we moved, and I had my second set of operations six months later. I’m really not sure how my mother coped, as her family was still out in Washington State, but we managed somehow.
Nascent Understandings of Christian CommunitySome of my earliest memories are from this time – events that have shaped me to this day. Memories of sitting in the middle of Campus Crusade staff meetings, weekly ‘S.A.L.T.’ groups and retreats; learning to eat all sorts of ethnic foods as my parents welcomed international students back to their home, took them to buy the ingredients for their favourite national dishes, and had the students teach my parents how to ‘do it right’; and attending Urbana 82. Through all of these experiences I came to attach a relationship with Christ with a relationship with others – with being a part of a welcoming, hospitable community. And so when my Sunday School teacher told us when I was about three that Christ had died on the cross for my sins, and that I could be His friend if only I asked, the answer was simple – of course I wanted to be Christ’s friend, and to be welcomed into this community of love and light and welcome. There really wasn’t any question about it in my mind. To this day, often buried deep down under the layers of skepticism, I carry this childlike faith, and when I think of Jesus saying we should come like little children, I stand in awe of how easy it was to ‘just believe’. I had met Jesus in the hands and feet and faces and smiles of the people I knew and loved, and it was a very, very simple decision to want to be connected to Him.
We lived just outside Hamilton, in a small town called Dundas, for five years. I started school there, had friends there, shared my first tracts there (!) and finished the time there as I had started - with a significant spiritual experience (baptism) and an operation. I was baptized on February 1st, 1987, at a little brethren bible chapel in Hamilton by my dad. I remember sitting between the knees of one of our elders, being asked why I wanted to be baptized, and being told the responsibilities I would undertake if I did so. And I remember making my dad promise that he would let me plug my nose before dunking me under!
The next day I went into hospital for my third set of operations. Nowadays no hospital wants a child left unattended for any length of time, but in those days even parents were only allowed during visiting hours, and there was certainly no place for a parent to sleep beside their child. So I was left alone in a ward with four other children, each of us in pain and scared. These were also the days when they admitted people a day early for pre-operative procedures, so the first night I spent there I was actually able to get in and out of bed on my own. I distinctly remember waking up in the night to the cries of the big twelve-year-old across the room from me. She had been in a skiing accident and had broken her leg very badly, so was in traction. Her call button had somehow fell out of her bed, and she was laying there, having wet the bed, unable to call for help. I remember getting up and calling the nurse myself, and then tiptoeing across the floor to stand next to her to tell her that she wasn’t alone, that someone would be there shortly. I remember how clearly I felt I understood what it felt to be alone, and how very clearly I was convinced, even at seven, that there was something wrong with this picture.
Back to TorontoThe day I came home from the hospital, my parents got a phone call from Campus Crusade. They were to transfer back to the University of Toronto, and we were to move again.
The process wasn’t easy on any of us, but I know I had a really hard time with it. I didn’t want to leave my friends, my little town where I could play with freedom, or our beautiful (my mother would add, small) house. My parents had finally had the chance to redecorate, and my room was a beautiful deep red with white wallpaper covered in small delicate primary-colour tulips. I loved it, and didn’t want to move.
All AloneThis unfortunately came with its consequences. I did not make friends easily in my new school in Mississauga. At best, I ostracized myself. At worst, I made enemies. I grew frustrated by my teachers and my peers, frustrated by school work that always seemed too easy or too hard, and frustrated and angry at my family for ‘making’ me feel this way. My poor parents.
Church wasn’t exactly easier. I didn’t really make friends their either, and always felt on the outside. This flew in the face of the concept of Christian community, that I intuitively felt was ‘right’, leaving me confused about what the reality was truly supposed to be. My experience of Christian Camps was regrettably no better, although at least then I was out in God's creation - a place I always felt it was easier to connect with Him than in suburbia. I am now quite sure that I had quite a big part to play in my inability to fit easily into this community, but at the time I simply felt hurt and left out.
Interestingly enough, this didn’t drive me away from God – it drove me closer. I would walk to school on my own almost every day, and on my way, decided it was better to walk to school with my friend Jesus than alone. So I began to sing and pray all the way there and back. I was a strange child.
Living Out God's VisionThe one thing that stayed the same through all of this was the fact that my parents continued to minister – particularly, and with a rapidly deepening calling, to the immigrant and refugee. In fact, my dad’s vision for what God wanted him to do – to mobilize the church to love across racial and cultural divisions – was so strong that when Campus Crusade asked him to move again, he said no, and they parted company. So for a couple of years we were without mission agency, and therefore mostly without support. And my dad was in the midst of pioneering a brand new ministry for which God had given him a vision, but not necessarily a whole lot of specifics.
I am extraordinarily grateful to God to have been able to witness this faithfulness, and the results of this faithfulness over the past twenty years. As I look forward to an equally uncertain process of following God's call, I am encouraged by the knowledge, learned on the front lines, that if God has called you to minister, He will provide for your physical needs, your emotional needs, the needs of your spouse and your children, not to mention fulfill the vision He has given you. Because its never really yours - its His. And He'll do it whether
you participate or not - its just a question of whether you want to come along for the ride.
PainWhen I was thirteen I had another series of four operations. These were to prove more invasive, more extensive, and more painful than anything I had previously experienced. I was forced to be off school for three months and in a wheelchair, then on crutches for another six months, and eventually walking with a cane for my four years of high school. The three months I spent off school, I spent basically on my own during the day. My mom worked – with little support coming in, what choice did she have? – and my dad was off doing ministry, which left me on the couch in our grey living room through a very cold and grey winter of 1993.
During that time I made friends with a girl I met in the hospital named Nikki, who was a year older than me and had been diagnosed with osteosarcoma – cancer of the bone. With her, I learned a little of the immensely challenging experience of fighting cancer. And while she survived, we both watched other children from our floor die of cancer that year.
I also discovered that year that I could earn the respect of my peers, that I could build relationships, and finished grade eight with a group of friends – the first in five years.
Healing and GrowingI will be forever grateful to my parents for choosing to send me to an alternative Arts high school, for at least three reasons:
1. At this arts school, although I might be weird or different from the other kids, I was only one weird one among 1300!
2. I was fortunate enough to come along at a time when there was a thriving Christian Fellowship. I became very involved – indeed, I became a junior and then senior leader there. It was within this group that I regained my conviction that Christian community could transcend differences (as noted by the fact that our group transcended cultural, denominational, and even welcomed those of other religious persuasions). I learned that sharing a meal together was often the most valuable thing we could do – we met at lunch time and as our time was limited to 1 hour and 15 minutes precisely, we always ate lunch together to begin with. And finally, I learned that prayer – daily, communal prayer – was vital to the health of the group, as we saw between 10 and 30 high school students meet every morning to pray before our school day started.
3. Because of cutbacks in school funding which meant school buses were unavailable, and because of the fact that I walked with a cane throughout high school, my parents drove me across Mississauga every morning and every afternoon to take me to and from school. This meant that I spent 25 – 30 minutes every morning with my dad, often discussing Christianity, ministry or music, and 25 – 30 minutes every afternoon dissecting the challenges and joys of the day with my mom.
I reached my teen years in the 1990's - at a time when the church was railing against abortions, particularly amongst teen girls. I also had a couple of friends who got pregnant during high school and chose not to abort. (Who knows how many friends I had who did have abortions). I remember thinking at the time that you could only ask someone to carry a pregnancy to term if you were willing to open your home to that woman, provide for her physical and emotional needs and assist her in completing her high school diploma and moving forward with her life - even if she put the child up for adoption. And if she didn't, then you would also need to be prepared to lend whatever assistance she would need in raising the child until she had grown up enough to do it on her own. It was a vision of hospitality far bigger than any I had seen at the time, but one that has stuck with me for more than twelve years!
Having spent an unusually large portion of my formative years attending missions conferences, it probably wasn’t surprising that I decided to go to Belgium with Operation Mobilization the summer I turned seventeen. The experience itself left me frustrated by what we were and were not able to accomplish within the ministry model provided – but it also left me with a couple of very good friendships … one of which is now my husband of eight years! In fact, by the time my eighteenth birthday hit, I was finished high school, engaged, and moving back to Edmonton for eight months to attend Bible School.
To many people in this world I grew up in a cushy environment and lead a cushy life. I always had food in my stomach, a roof over my head, parents who loved me and each other, an excellent education and a knowledge of God buried deep into the roots of my life. But it would be a disservice to God not to acknowledge the fact that I grew up knowing what it meant to be a stranger, to feel alone and unwanted, to suffer pain or to know fear, all in small but memorable ways. The incredible thing to me is that I always knew that this was for a purpose that was yet to be revealed – a purpose greater than any of these things, but impossible without them.
And so, without even traveling into the period of my early adult life, I would say that the themes of being missional have been woven through the fabric of my life since before I was born. What is still odd to me is hearing these themes being expressed from other people's mouths after years of assuming that it was just me. I thank God for allowing me the privilege of growing up missional, and eagerly await just what He will do with this incredible heritage.
