Missions And Your Children

One of the concerns I’ve often heard from people considering a life invested in missions is, “What about my kids?”  Parents worry about how the experience of growing up overseas will affect their children.  Now I think that is a valid concern.  I remember how I felt driving into Tete, Mozambique on a trip seeking to discover whether Anne and I should move there.  I remember vividly thinking, “How would my kids adjust to living here?”  Well, my life is at least in part a product of the decision my parents made to give their lives in service in the small Latin American country called Uruguay.  I don’t doubt that there will be some losses for your children if you were to follow God’s lead to a culture worlds away, but there are many positives too.  Let me share a few of them. 

L-R (Steve, Don, Jimmy & Alan)

Maybe this will be the most obvious, but your children will grow up bilingual.  As our world becomes progressively smaller with rapid transportation and the networking of the World Wide Web, being able to speak two languages is such a boon.  It will not only open doors of opportunity in business, but it will give them an open door to many relationships they never would have had otherwise.   From my own perspective, being able to speak Spanish along with English is something I treasure profoundly.

Your children will be multi-cultural and by that I mean, they will see themselves as something broader than just Americans.  Please don’t misunderstand.  I love our country.  There is not a country in the world like America.  Her freedoms and opportunities are indeed the shining star of our world, and I believe those have come about because of our Judeo-Christian heritage--but I’ll leave that to another post.  But my point is that I am just as much a Uruguayan, in my heart, as I am an American.  I love Uruguay.  I was raised there.  Uruguayans are in part my people.  Please don’t hate me for this but if Uruguay and the USA ever meet in the World Cup, I’m confessing ahead of time I’ll probably be pulling for Uruguay.   When your children grow up in a different land, they have a bigger perspective than just America and I think that is a good thing.

Children of missionaries will often be stretched emotionally and socially, and as a result be more adaptable to what comes their way.  Because we are kids of two lands, two cultures, we learn to change, to adjust, from homeland to homeland.  Back here in Virginia, where we’re from, Christmas is in the winter; it’s usually extremely cold and we’re all hoping for a white Christmas.  Where I grew up in Uruguay Christmas is in the dead of summer, sometimes in the nineties on Christmas day.  And Christmas is celebrated with fireworks, not Christmas carols.  As a son of missionaries, I learned to roll with the tide.  Change and differences were a regular part of life.

I know every child is different, but I believe another positive from growing up in a foreign land will be an earlier and greater maturity.  I’m assuming this maturity comes about because of some of the things I’ve already mentioned, for example the flexibility and the multi-culturalism, but your children will tend to rapidly mature emotionally and socially.  From an early age I rode buses in a large metropolitan city of a million and a half—by myself.  Consequently, at the age of seventeen my parents allowed me and another friend of the same age to travel to Europe.  For the next five weeks we toured all over the continent with only a train pass, a map to different youth hostiles, and a small pack of clothes.  I recognize that was a different day, and I’m not so sure they’d be willing to do that in these times, but my point is that we tend to mature early on.  I asked my parents, as a parent myself, how could they have let their seventeen-year-old son do that?  Their response was simply, “You were mature enough and we knew you could be trusted.”

Celebrating Dad's Birthday with Family

There is one more thing your children will gain if you choose to invest your life in reaching the nations—they will get an extended family that will be theirs until they die!  I said I treasure being bilingual, and I do, but I treasure just as much or more the “aunts and uncles” that come along with being part of a mission.   Every one of my parent’s fellow missionaries became my uncle Dennis or my aunt Peggy.   Even at the good ole age of fifty-five, it’s hard for me not to call them uncle Jimmie or aunt Norma.  They will always be family to me and your fellow missionaries will always be family, true family, loving family, to your kids as well.

I know that not every missionary kid or every mission experience will fit the bill as I’ve described it here, but I'm convinced most will.  Don’t be afraid to follow God’s lead to the ends of the earth because of what it will do to your children.  Your children will be blessed beyond measure.