Caring for Missionaries
There are many ways to care for missionaries. Bonnie I have been involved in many of them during the last quarter of a century; however, more than half a dozen of these ministries have become major ways we have cared for missionaries and for their children. Four of those ministries lasted for several years, but for various reasons, they came to an end. Three of the ministries are still major ways we serve missionaries. Some of these are mentioned elsewhere in the book. Here is a summary of our major ministries during the last two decades.
Third Culture Kids
First, our ministry to TCKs at Asbury College began in 1996. We were both still working full time, but we had 50+ TCKs attending Asbury College. As soon as TCKs applied to Asbury, the admissions office would send me their email address, and we began corresponding with them as one of their prospective teachers who was interested in them.
When they arrived in Kentucky to begin their studies, Bonnie and I were available to help them. We picked them up at the airport, let them stay at our home until their dorm opened, were part of their orientation to the USA and Asbury, took them to visit Wal-Mart (not to buy anything, just to look around), and anything else that would help during the three-day orientation.
During the semester we attended their activities, such as movie night at which The Gods Must Be Crazy was a favorite. We went camping with them in state parks in Kentucky. We made our basement available for them to use for parties or other gatherings, We were available to take them to get identification cards at the county court house, helped them with income tax, taught some to drive, and just helped in any way we could.
Probably most important was that we invited them up to Sunday dinner every other week. We invited about 35 each time, and 10-12 usually came. Freshmen were most likely to come, and seniors the least likely, which would be expected. We mostly let them talk with each other while we listened and learned much about them.
When I quit teaching in 2002, we intended to continue the ministry, but with me not on campus to interact with the TCKs and our travel increasing, we found that attendance at Sunday dinner decreased. The last time we had them up to dinner in the spring of 2004, only three attended. Two of them were sophomores, and one a senior! Not one new TCK in the two years was there. This ministry lasted 8 years.
Personal Visits
Second, our first trip for member care was to Bolivia in 1997. One of my former students who was teaching at Bolivian Evangelical University called to ask us about a situation in the psychology department there. After talking about it, we offered to come down to help if she would like us to do so. She wanted us to come, our first time to visit missionaries in other countries. We made many other trips to Bolivia staying at guest houses with World Gospel Mission, South America Mission, and Evangelical Church mission when invited. We had a list of 50 missionary units and a mailing list of more than 100 to whom we sent birthday and anniversary cards each year. These trips to Bolivia continued until 2009.
In the following years we visited missionaries on five continents (not Australia). We wanted to make repeat visits so that we could develop continuing relationships, and the longest lasting time for that was to visit teachers at a conference in Thailand. We were there to be counselors (along with others) to a group of 450-600 teachers in countries in Asia. Of course, while there we visited missionaries in Chiang Mai as well as those at the conference. Our first visit to Thailand 2005 and our last was in 2012. This ministry of personal visits lasted 15 years.
Orientation
Third, in 1998 OMS International asked us to participate in their cross-training, a part of their orientation for missionary candidates. The person who was to do the sessions on conflict resolution cancelled, and they needed someone to do it. They also asked for a session on relationships. We became a regular part of cross-training for years, including sessions on expectations, generational differences, and so forth. We participated in these sessions two or three times each year and influenced well over 100 missionary candidates. At times we were also part of orientation with World Gospel Mission, and this continued until 2005. This ministry of orientation lasted 8 years.
Reentry Retreats
Fourth, in 2001 we facilitated our first reentry retreat with World Gospel Mission. After that we did an average of about four reentry retreats each year for three agencies, including OMS International and The Mission Society for United Methodists. Most of the retreats were 2 to 2.5 days long and included about 8-10 sessions. We were available to talk with individuals or couples during free times. We did 35 such retreats which included more than 350 missionaries. The last reentry retreat was in 2008, so that reentry retreat ministry also lasted 8 years. Since then individuals and couples come to us in Wilmore for a one or two day reentry debriefing.
Brochures
Fifth, in 1998 I wrote the first brochure in the “What missionaries Ought to Know…” series. I had six missionary couples read the brochure and tell me whether or not missionaries would read them. I also asked them to suggest other topics that needed to be written—if the brochures were good. All six couples assured me that the brochures would be helpful for missionaries, and all suggested a variety of other topics. One topic was suggested by all 12 readers, and that was a brochure about conflict between missionaries. The second brochure I wrote was “What Missionaries Ought to Know about Conflict. These brochures were posted under the psychology department of the Asbury college website, and I added new ones until I retired.
These brochures were later posted on our two websites, www.missionarycare.com and www.crossculturalworkers.com when we moved them from the Asbury website. Now both websites have 106 brochures available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. As I am writing, people are downloading them at the rate of more than 600/day, about 18,000 each month.
Websites
Sixth, in 2003 a former student finally convinced me that we needed our own website, and he became our webmaster. In addition to the material on the Asbury website, he suggested putting the “Ought to Know…” brochures into a book format so that people could get them all together. So we posted that book and a book about reentry on www.missionarycare.com. Then we added more books.
When we were providing member care to people working in Southeast Asia, the people serving there told us that they were not able to visit a website that had the word “missionary” in its URL as well as references to anything about missions. So, in 2005 I went through all of the brochures and all of the books removing such words and rewording them so that they could be posted on www.crossculturalworkers.com .
Now there are 17 books available on missionarycare.com and 10 books available on crossculturalworkers.com. Some of the books simply did not make sense if I tried to remove missionary words. During the last six years people have downloaded an average of 50,000 books each year. That is an average of more than 100 books each day.
Korean Member Care
Eighth, in 2011 several Koreans contacted us about translating the brochures into Korean and making them available online. The first brochures were posted on their website in 2012. Now they have 79 brochures available on their website, http://www.anmcusa.org/. People have downloaded more than 480,000 copies of the brochures. The All Nations Mission Center also has a three-week retreat to refresh and revitalize missionaries, and we are part of that. They are also in the process of translating five other member care books on mssionarycare.com.
Specific Memories and Musings
Below, in alphabetical order, are titles of brief descriptions of memories I have about a wide variety of member care situations. These provide examples of situations, experiences or issues that persons newly entering the field of member care may encounter. These are not intended to be read in any particular order, all are self-contained.
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Will we have enough money for international travel and other ministry expenses? |
Most missionaries on the field want member care workers to give answers or suggestions, not to paraphrase what they just said. Unless they are dealing with deep personal problems, these missionaries are facing current problems they want to solve, and the member care person saying; “What I hear you saying is…” is of little help. Even empathy, saying something like, “I feel your pain…” is of little help.
Member care workers from a counseling or psychological background may find it difficult to step out of their therapeutic roles and into helper roles where they give possible solutions to the stated problems. We have found that even when we saw general personal problems that we could help solve, we found it best to begin by giving practical suggestions that might help solve the specific issue that was troubling the missionaries. Sometimes this meant waiting until a later visit to the field months or years later.
We often enjoyed trying new foods when we were visiting missionaries in other countries. When they suggested that we try something, we nearly always did, and we usually liked it. When we were eating in small restaurants near hotels where we were staying and there were no English translations, we asked the missionaries to write down the names of meals we would like.
Of course, some restaurants had English translations, and we could look at those and at pictures of the food. One time in China the menu picture looked good, and it was reasonably priced. However, we were not even tempted to try it when we noticed that the English translation said, “MIX ARSENIC INTO A POT OF CURRY…”
Although we like curry, we wanted to make sure some over-zealous cook did not get measurements mixed up. It was probably a poor translation, but we wanted to make sure!
A complimentary breakfast came with the hotel room, so we found our way to the room where it was served. Nearly every eye in the room followed us as we found our way to a table and walked over to where the food was available. We were the only Americans there. Everyone looked Chinese. As we walked by the counter where the food was, we did not recognize anything, and the Chinese characters there had no meaning for us.
We each took a variety of foods and headed back to our table. We tried a bite of this and a bite of that, and found nothing that we cared for. I finally remembered that there was a McDonalds just down the street and asked Bonnie if she would like to go there for breakfast. Without hesitation she said she would. We continued to kind of push the food around on our plates and finally got up and left. At McDonalds, there were some English words on the menu as well as pictures of the food. We had a good breakfast of more familiar food.
We stayed in the home of a missionary on our very first member care visit overseas. We were the only ones living in the house, but various nationals who worked for her came and went at different times during the day. At first, we did not even realize that a cat was living there with us.
When we began eating our first meal, a cat suddenly appeared and jumped up onto the table! We had both grown up on farms where we had cats and dogs, but we had never had one on the table. We chased the cat off and returned to our meal, but the cat came right back up. No matter what we did while eating the cat was there. We finally realized that the cat had the run of the house, even the top of the table during meals. The only way for us to have a meal without the cat on the table was to close the cat in another room.
The next time we visited that field we were in a different city and staying with another family. When we went into our bedroom and began getting ready for bed, we realized that the cats in that house lived under our bed. We found cats on the bed, throughout the house, but most often under our bed.
As the statistician in the psychology department at Asbury, I was the one who gathered data on students in the department for 30 years. To show that our students were learning psychology, I was the one to get their test scores at the beginning of their first general psychology course, at the end of that course, and during the required senior seminar at the end of their major.
Along with those scores, I kept records for a number ofother things, including what the seniors did after they graduated. When I began teaching at Asbury in 1970 about half of the graduating seniors went to seminary to continue their preparation for “full-time” Christian service as ministers and missionaries. This was just what I had felt called to do, prepare people for such a task. Less than a quarter went on to graduate school, and the rest did a variety of things.
Over the years, I saw the percentage of those going on to seminary declined. In 20 years the numbers going to seminary dropped to less than half of what it was, and the number going on to graduate school increased some. This was rather disconcerting to me.
As we moved into the 1990s, I found that I was having trouble thinking like the students did. One spring I told Bonnie that I must be really “out of it.” However, as the faculty lined up for commencement in order of rank and years of service, several of the people around me in the line were talking about the same thing. I went home and told Bonnie that I was not out of it, I was just getting old. That fall, in a committee meeting with faculty of all ages, I heard even the younger faculty in their 30s and 40s saying the same thing. I went home and told Bonnie it was not my being out of it or being old, everyone was saying the same thing. At that time I had not even heard of “postmodernism,” but when I did, I recognized it immediately.
I also noted a difference in student thinking about missions. Rather than saying it myself, here is a direct quote from the 125th anniversary of Asbury, page 163. “The college commitment to world evangelism remained strong, but students themselves recognized the traditional role of the lifetime overseas missionary was in permanent decline. Now there were short-term missions trips and the ‘foreign immersion experience.’” Rather than preparing students, I determined to serve by attempting to keep missionaries already serving on the field.
While we were visiting in their host country, a missionary couple called and asked if they could take us to the zoo for half a day. Of course, we agreed to go. Then they called back and asked if we could spend the whole day with them, and we agreed.
As we began looking at the animals, they began to talk about issues they were facing, issues on which they wanted our input. It was a fascinating day of stopping near a cage so that they could tell about the animal we saw. The animals in the zoo were different than the usual tigers, lions, elephants, and so forth from around the world; they were nearly all animals that were native to the country itself. The conversation would soon turn to an issue. Then we would move on to sit on a bench near some beautiful flowers that they told us about, and another issue came up.
This was repeated throughout the morning, at lunch, and through midafternoon. It was a fascinating day of getting well-acquainted with the couple, helping them, and learning about the flora and fauna in the county.
Counseling in the Sausage House
We were at a small staff retreat meeting at the field director’s home. One of the missionaries wanted to meet with us and had asked where we could meet alone for a couple hours. Although it was one of the larger homes on the field, there was no good place to meet in the house where we would not be disturbed.
After some thought, the field director and his wife suggested that we meet in the sausage house. Seeing our puzzled looks, they explained what they meant. They brought spices from the United States. Then they would buy a pig, slaughter it, grind it up, and make sausage like they could get at grocery stores in the USA. Other missionaries, both from their agency and other agencies, ordered sausage and they sold it to Americans all over the city. Sometimes the sausage house had a pig hanging in it, and sometimes the sausage was stored there. However, at that particular time, nothing was in it, and it was improbable that anyone would find us in the sausage house.
The three of us met in the small brick building, looking much like a large outhouse. It was clean and smelled a bit like the meat department of a grocery store, but it was cool, offered privacy, and no one disturbed us in the couple of hours we were there. That was probably the most unusual place where we had a counseling session.
Cross-Cultural Marriages are very difficult
I knew that cross-cultural marriages were difficult, but I learned the hard way when we began visiting missionaries on the field. A young woman missionary had met a national about her age while in language school in the host country, but several hours drive from where most of the agency missionaries were assigned. We were there at a conference to which all agency missionaries in the country had come.
She asked to talk with us about marrying a national. He was not at the conference, so we did not meet him. Their fathers were both pastors of churches of the same denomination. Both of them had university educations and were working as professionals. They had met at his father’s church where they were both on the worship team. Both his denomination and her agency had the same theological statement. If/when they married, he was going to join her agency, and they were planning to serve as missionaries in his country. With all of those similarities and the assurance from other missionaries in her agency that he was a good person, we told her that we could see no reason she should not marry him.
Unfortunately, we had underestimated the full result of being from different cultures. When we returned a year later, they were married. However, he soon found that he did not like her agency. The next time we visited the country, he was back up in the city where his father’s church was, and she was serving where most of the rest of her agency was. By the next time we visited, they were divorced.
Knowing what we know now, after seeing many cross-cultural marriages in which a woman who has grown up in the USA marries a man from another culture, we would have recommended much more caution. We would have recommended that together they study In Love but Worlds Apart: Insights, Questions and Tips for the Intercultural Couple by G. Shelling and J. Fraser-Smith and/or Intercultural Marriage: Promise & Pitfalls (3rd edition) by Dugan Romano. Both were published in 2008. Intercultural marriages are not impossible, but they are very difficult.
After respecializing in counseling psychology and beginning to post brochures on the Asbury website something happened that devastated me. A class of six students rated my performance in a class. Five of those six students gave me the lowest possible rating on all the items, and they had all said that I was a very bad teacher, and many of the things they said were just not true. I was shocked and numb when I got the results.
I never fully recovered from that incident, the joy of teaching was gone. I had completed my preparation for member care and had already told the provost when I was leaving so that he and the department could begin to make plans to replace me. I taught those few years, and realized anew that God uses such things for our good. One good thing about it was that I was more ready to leave teaching and go on to what God had for me in member care.
Another good thing from having this experience is that it is common for missionaries to be rejected and betrayed by the people they have come to serve as well. When they tell me, “I do not understand,” I can describe what happened to me and assure them that the experience is common among missionaries and pastors. I must emphasize that this was not general behavior of our students, but it taught me that “anything” can happen even with good people.
While staying at the guesthouse of one agency we were meeting with people serving with various agencies. We met in the library to talk privately with them. To enter the compound, visitors had to come through the front door of the building containing offices and security. A couple from another agency in the city had scheduled an appointment with us, and we waited in the hall near the offices.
When we saw the couple nearing the entrance, we went out and met them on the sidewalk. As the four of us came into the building and started down the hall, one of the missionaries of the agency where we were staying met us and said to the entering couple, “Oh, so you are the ones. They said they had a really tough case this afternoon!”
I was shocked! I quickly turned to the couple that had just arrived and said something like, “I don’t know what he is talking about. I never said anything like that to anyone!”
Suddenly everyone was laughing! It turned out that the man who said it and the couple who had just arrived had gone to language school together and were good friends.
Dogs
Many missionaries have dogs, especially those who live in houses that have enclosed yards. These dogs often look mean, growl a lot, and bark along the fence or at the gate. They are there to frighten nationals who may be looking for access to a place where they are not supposed to be.
Although these dogs appear mean and may jump up on strangers, we have never been bitten by one. We have received a few scratches on our hands or arms or some dirt or mud on our clothing, but the dogs are not usually dangerous. If one just stands still and lets the dog sniff all over, the dogs generally lose interest.
However, they may actually hurt someone occasionally. One Easter we were eating dinner with two missionary families. We adults were in the dining room, and the elementary age children were eating out on the porch. Suddenly we heard the dog growling and barking, along with fearful cries from the children. The parents ran out onto the porch and brought back a boy bleeding from bites in several places. The host’s dog had for some reason turned on the guest’s child. That was the end of our dinner together.
We had been trained to do a Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, so we made arrangements to have a CISD the next day. Fortunately, both families were still friends, forgiving, and willing to talk. The one family had a frightened child, and the other family would lose its dog. It was a sad day for both.
Looking over a statement of our account I noticed a donation of $1000 from a Presbyterian church. Knowing that we seldom received donations that large and not recognizing the church, I immediately sent an email to GO International suggesting that they check to see if that donation was really for us, and if it was, to give me more information about the donor.
I immediately received an email saying that the donation was for us, there were no limitations on its use, and the church address was included. Bonnie and I had not been in the city where the church is, and we could not even think of anyone we knew who lived in that city. We visited the church’s website. Nothing on the home page or history of the church would explain the donation, but we did find that the church had a real emphasis on missions. When we clicked on “Staff,” we found the answer to our questions. The senior pastor of the church was a former student of mine. He was a psychology major graduating 44 years before that! What a delightful, unexpected surprise that was, and it enabled us to connect again.
Midafternoon on May 12, 2008, Bonnie and I were seated near the transfer desk in the Xi’an airport waiting for confirmation that our bags were being sent on our next flight to Xining. We noticed a rumbling noise coming from below and speculated that the noise was coming from several trucks with large diesel engines below us in the terminal. Then we noticed that everything was shaking and people were running across the terminal. As we stood there in confusion a young Chinese man said, “Earthquake! Out quickly!
Even though we were more than 300 miles from the epicenter, the floor of the terminal was moving enough to make walking difficult. We picked up our carryon luggage and headed toward the nearest exit. It does not take long to evacuate a terminal because every jet-way has steps to the ground, and as we were going down the steps, we noticed that tall light posts were waving very noticeably at the top. The earthquake went on for a full three minutes, so we could feel it even after we reached the tarmac.
When the shaking stopped, we took out our cellphone and called our contact in Xining, and he did not realize there had been an earthquake. They had not felt it there, and he was not watching the news. He encouraged us, and we made arrangements to call him whenever we knew more about when we might arrive. After the airport personnel was convinced that the terminal had no structural damage, we all went back in and attempted to find out when we might continue traveling.
The airport personnel seemed to know two words in English, and those were “delayed” and “cancelled” which seemed to be synonyms. It soon became clear that the earthquake had disrupted air travel all over China. A lady came up to us asking if we spoke English. She was so glad to find someone who could help her—the problem was that we were as helpless as she was. Fortunately, a young Chinese gentleman overheard us talking and offered to go with us to talk to the Chinese at the desk. He found that our flight was scheduled to leave from a different gate. When we arrived there, the plane was with a different airline!
Much more happened, but we finally realized that airlines were swapping their planes so that the name of the airline on our tickets would not match the name on the plane. We finally arrived in Xining about 10:00 PM, 19 long hours after the first mosquito in our hotel room woke us up.
We had never had the problem of an early flight when traveling internationally, but we learned that sometimes domestic flights in some countries may actually leave earlier than the scheduled time. Fortunately, we did not have to learn that the hard way.
We visited a missionary family that lived in a town large enough to have an airport, but a relatively small one. We were scheduled to fly to a hub near the center of the country to catch a flight to the large city where we were located during our time in the country. We were familiar with having to call the airline the day before to confirm that we were still planning to fly at that time, and we had already done that.
Our flight was scheduled to leave in the early afternoon; however, we noticed that the family we were staying with called the airline several times during the morning. We were puzzled and asked why the repeated calls were made. Although we had a scheduled time to fly, the airline was known for departing from the airport whenever the scheduled plane had arrived and its passengers had left the plane. They would simply tidy up the plane, take whatever passengers were there, and leave for the next city on its schedule regardless of the time. If we had missed that flight, we would have had to wait until the next day.
Before visiting missionaries on the field we always talked with them about the issues with which we were willing and able to help them. We did not want to get into long term situations that could not be handled in a week or so of intense counseling.
One couple asked us to come visit them. We had agreed on the issue, and we had spent many hours in the air to reach them. We were in our second session with them when we realized that the real problem was not what we had come to deal with, but a much more basic relationship problem. We asked the couple if they had had any counseling about this issue, and we found out that they had met with counselors about the issue during three different home ministry assignments! Our hearts sank because we knew that we had little chance of making any progress in a week on an issue that they had spent many hours talking about over more than a decade of their lives.
We still tried and spent more than twenty hours with them, but we also made ourselves available to other missionaries on the field as well.
One afternoon, in April 2001, John Muehleisen unexpectedly came into my office on the corner of the second floor of Reasoner Hall in the Asbury College campus. After greetings and some small talk, he said that he would like Bonnie and me to do something. The people who had done their reentry retreats at WGM would no longer be doing them, and he wanted us to facilitate their reentry retreat in early July.
I immediately told John that I had never led a reentry retreat. In fact, I had never even attended a reentry retreat to see how it should be done. He still wanted us to do it, so I called Bonnie at home and asked her to come up to my office to talk with John. When she arrived, I summarized our previous conversation for her. Then we asked if we could come to the one in July to learn from observing what the previous people had done. He said that was not possible.
After further discussion with John, we finally said we would do it, but we were “scared to death.” He said that was good. That July we met with 11 returning missionaries at WGM headquarters in Marion, IN. Although we felt unprepared, the reentry retreat went well, and the missionaries were great. After 35 years of teaching, it was our habit to assess how we did. So we had the missionaries fill out an evaluation form which included their rating us from 1 – 9 on a dozen or so items related to the reentry. We received an average of 6.30 on the items. In addition, we asked for other comments and suggestions.
We did a second reentry retreat in September with 18 returning missionaries, and we made several modifications suggested on the evaluation forms. We received an average of 7.93 of a possible 9.00. Not only that, but facilitating reentry retreats became our favorite activity for many years. We did more than 30 reentry retreats with three different agencies including more than 350 missionaries. Even after these agencies decided not to continue the retreats or do them in-house, we continued to offer reentry retreats or individual/couple debriefings here in Wilmore,
We closely followed the recommendations given for eating and drinking when we could without offending anyone. We avoided food that had not been cooked except for fruit and vegetables we had peeled ourselves or that someone we knew and had confidence in had peeled. The grapes or tomatoes may have looked delicious, but we avoided them. We drank only bottled water that we had opened ourselves or what had been boiled in someone’s home. We were careful about swallowing water in the shower or when brushing our teeth.
We did not think something in the food or water might kill us, but we were there for only a week or ten days, and missionaries had appointments with us. We did not want to have sickness keep us from seeing them all. Of course, we still did not avoid all illness, but we were not ill much of the time. Our worst experience was when the resort at which the conference was held had not changed its filters, so the shower water was not free of organisms. About 400 of the 600 people at the conference became very sick, and some passed out.
A physician recommended our taking one Pepto-Bismol tablet each day we were there just to calm our digestive system, and that seemed to help prevent the routine kinds of illness. At least we did what we could to avoid illness.
We prefer to visit the same group of missionaries repeatedly so that we can develop relationships. That way we know them well and can pick up from where we left off the last time. One field with about 40 adults asked us to come once or twice a year, usually when they had meetings at which those serving in outlying areas came into the city for several days, and they could schedule meetings with us if they wanted to talk privately.
By the end of our second time there nearly everyone had scheduled time with us, had eaten a meal with us, or had invited us into their own homes. However, one couple was obviously avoiding us. They did not look up if we walked by them or sit near us in meetings. They were not required to talk with us, but we could not just ignore them. So we made it a point to eat a meal with them once each trip or sit by them in meetings that included discussion. We just made small talk with them so that we could get acquainted a bit.
During the first five times we went we never had a deep conversation with either of them. However, as soon as we arrived the sixth time they came to us and made an appointment to talk with us about important topics. It took five years to gain their confidence.
We arrived at the airport to begin our flight overseas. When we reached the desk to check in, the agent at the desk took our itineraries and passports. This was before the days of checking yourself in, and e-tickets were just beginning to be used. After looking our papers over and checking things on his computer, the agent looked at us and said to Ron, “You can go, but she needs a paper ticket.”
We asked him to print a ticket for her, at least boarding passes, but he said the way the reservation was made, he could not access it on-line. The agent who had made the reservation needed to make some change in her reservation to allow the desk agent to get the reservation. Since our plane was scheduled to take off rather soon, Bonnie said, “Ron, you go ahead, and I will come as soon as we get this straightened out.”
The agent tried to call the lady who had issued the ticket in Mobile, Alabama, where she worked, but she was not at her phone. He finally reached her, and she made the needed changes so the he could issue Bonnie’s boarding pass; but for some reason no claim check was issued for her baggage. After more than 20 minutes at the counter, we hurried to the gate and arrived to find that, due to bad weather in Atlanta, the plane would take off late.
After a 20-minute delay, we took off for Atlanta, where we sat on the tarmac waiting for a gate. We finally got off the plane only 15 minutes before our next plane was scheduled to take off. We hurried through the airport to our gate where they were holding the plane for us—and several others from our previous flight. The rest of the flight was rather routine except when we arrived at our final destination. Bonnie’s bag did not arrive. So we had to file a claim for the bag with no claim check.
We had spent about three hours talking with a missionary who had returned to the USA about two months before meeting with us. She had been in an Asian country a long time and briefly in an African one. She felt responsible for providing for two young women who lived with her. She was on a limited income and wanted to know a good place to buy clothing and other items for them. When we suggested Goodwill stores, she immediately replied that, although she knew how to shop at places like Kohls and Walmart, she could not figure out how to shop at Goodwill. She had gone in, and just walked out—something not uncommon for returning missionaries.
We told her we would take her to the nearest Goodwill store before we parted. Then we explained that people donated useful items to Goodwill, the store sold them for very low prices, and that she would probably be able to buy articles of clothing for a few dollars. We also noted that Goodwill also frequently hired handicapped individuals to work in their stores. In fact, the store we would go to hired Bill, the microcephalic son of good friends of ours, and Bill often greeted us when we donated things.
When we entered the store, we pointed out fitting rooms as we walked through the store looking at everything from clothing, to books, to furniture. We pointed out that individual items had no prices attached, but that all items on a rack sold for the price attached to the rack. For example, a rack of women’s skirts would all sell for $3.00 if that is the price on the rack. Just about at that time Bill saw us and rushed over to us saying, “RON!! HOW ARE YOU DOING? IT SURE IS GOOD TO SEE YOU!” as he literally threw his arms around me. The missionary just stood there with a big smile on her face.
Even with the precautions we took, we still occasionally got sick, as happens to anyone in a different country. However, we also experienced a time when hundreds of people became ill. We were at a very nice resort in the mountains near Chiang Mai, Thailand, with a group of about 650 English teachers serving in several Asian countries. We had been there with the group several times before and all had gone well. However, people began to get sick this time.
We were at the evening service on our second day at the resort. We left during the service because Bonnie did not feel well. Like the others, she could not hold anything down for about 24 hours. Whatever it was struck quickly and without warning. Another counselor who left the service shortly after we did passed out on the way back to her room, and others found her lying on the path. The illness spread rapidly through the group until about 400 people had it. We did have a physician with our group, but in those few days he could not figure what had happened.
The group to follow us that year was a group of Christian physicians. From what the leaders of our group told them and what they saw happening in their group, they decoded that it had to be in the water supply. Sure enough, they discovered that the water filters had not been changed recently, and new filters in that system resulted in a healthy meeting for the doctors.
When we began visiting missionaries on the field, usually overseas, we knew that we had to set a limit on how long we would stay away from home and how much time we would need at home between trips. We received a variety of answers, so we knew that the limits varied between individuals. We decided to test our limits.
We had made trips of ten days or two weeks and knew that was no problem for us. When we were asked by an agency to spend three weeks on a field of about 40 missionaries living in several parts of the country, we agreed to go for three weeks. The majority of the missionaries lived in one of the large cities, but several couples or small groups of missionaries lived in outlying areas. We were based in the guesthouse in the large city, but when we visited those in the outlying areas, we stayed in missionary homes.
Before the three weeks were up, we realized that staying that long was more than we wanted to do. We decided that two weeks should be our limit, and we also insisted for a Sabbath at the end of each week—a day of rest.
To make sure that people who came to us for help understood who we were and what we do, we gave a copy of the following statement to everyone and verbally noted the information about our qualifications and the conditions under which we would break confidence. Then we asked if they had any questions:
We provide member care for missionaries emphasizing personal growth, development, and prevention of problems, rather than attempting solutions to serious difficulties. We do not work with missionaries who have such serious difficulties that they should be seeing a licensed mental health professional, such as a psychologist or psychiatrist. Since we deal with prevention rather than long term cure, we do not talk with people for extended periods of time. Problems faced when they begin are much easier to solve than those allowed to develop over a long time.
We view ourselves as being in the “Order of Stephanus” as described in 1 Corinthians 16. Paul wrote that the household of Stephanaus had “devoted themselves to the service of the saints….supplied what was lacking….refreshed my spirit” when they came to visit him. We see ourselves as people who understand to some extent the special needs of missionaries and come along side them to help, comfort, and affirm. There is never any charge for what we do; missionaries are guests in our home.
Ordinarily anything shared with us is held in confidence with the exception of the following. (1) Intention to harm yourself or others. (2) Reports of abuse. (3) Court order to reveal something. (4) Intention to sabotage the mission agency. We are not licensed as psychologists or counselors, and we are not ordained ministers. We are knowledgeable friends of missionaries who would like to offer a sympathetic ear and whatever help we can as amateurs in its original sense, those who do something out of love.
When we began visiting people overseas, we were careful to get inoculated for diseases found in the country we were visiting. Of course, we soon realized that in member care we were visiting many different countries and flying over many others so that we needed to be inoculated for “everything.” For example, the country we were visiting did not have yellow fever, but we were flying over countries that did—and we may have to land in those countries because of mechanical failures or bad weather.
We were then very careful to keep our inoculations up-to-date. That can be difficult because some of them are one time only, others last ten years, and others only a very short time.
Traveling doing member care results in some rather unusual things. For example, even though we are not sports fans, we have watched parts of the Super Bowl in four countries. In addition to seeing it here in the USA, we have watched parts of it in Mozambique, Thailand, and Korea.
One year we were traveling on Bonnie’s birthday, and Ron takes credit for making her birthday last for 36 hours! Another time we ate our daily usual three meals in three different countries on two continents: breakfast in Thailand, lunch in Korea, and dinner in the USA.
We were with a group conducting a VBS in a small church in the mountains of eastern Jamaica. We had driven to the end of the road, crossed the Rio Grande on a bamboo raft, and walked about a quarter of a mile down the river to the church on the bank. It was the summer of 1993, and we knew that we were called to serve in missions some way, but we were trying to figure out how.
We had gone to Spain in 1990 to do some teaching about adolescence and to Bolivia in 1991 to do some fund raising to build a university, but neither of these things seemed to be what God had for us. To keep our interest in missions alive, we took a short term trip to Jamaica to help with a VBS. During that week our primary ministry was to children, and services for adults were held in the evenings.
The Jamaicans loved singing, and one of their favorite songs repeated “Jesus is a wiener mon.” We had talked with the Jamaicans enough to know that they pronounced “man” as “mon,” but we could not figure out why they were calling him a wiener man. We finally realized that they were pronouncing “winner” as “wiener.” Of course, Jesus is a winner.
Just like Mom’s
When we invited TCKs at the college to our home for Sunday dinners on alternate Sundays, we fed them a variety of foods. One week we served sloppy joes. When one student bit into the bun, he was very excited and said “Wow, just like Mom used to make!”
We didn’t have the heart to tell him they were Manwich, which comes from a can available at any grocery store here in the USA.”
I had taught psychology for many years, and Bonnie had been an elementary teacher. During the early years of our ministry, Bonnie was learning some basic things to do and not to do during counseling sessions.
A couple had invited us to visit them on their field, and we had agreed on what issues we were going to deal with while we were there. We had been there a day or two and were still adjusting to jet lag, but we were in one of the early sessions with the four of us sitting on the four sides of a small square table as we talked.
Although the issue we were discussing was somewhat related to the purpose of our trip there, it became apparent that the husband was not treating his wife with respect. Bonnie’s anger became more and more apparent. She was lecturing him like she would have done to a cocky fifth grader in the classroom.
Ron did not know quite what to do, but finally he started literally kicking Bonnie under the table as one might see in a TV show. She got the message and backed off. That evening we talked about things that would be best left unsaid even though the husband certainly deserved the lecture.
While attending a conference at a mountain resort, two men on the same team made an appointment with us to help them settle a disagreement. As was our custom, Bonnie and I both met with them for that hour, our next to last appointment of the day. Near the end of the hour we still had not fully settled the disagreement, and a woman was scheduled for the next hour. We were making progress and did not want to interrupt the session, so Bonnie excused herself and waited outside the door for the woman to come. The three of us left in the room continued the session.
Bonnie and the woman found a place to sit outside and talk. Their session went well, and when Bonnie returned to our room she realized that our session was still going. As I looked out the window of our room, I saw people making preparations for the picnic dinner that evening. The session continued, and I did not want to risk even leaving the pair and going to the bathroom. Finally, after a full four hours, I excused myself saying that I had to use the restroom. When I returned, they were still talking.
The session lasted four and a half hours! I had to find some food because dinner was over and everything was picked up. However, I felt good about the result. We saw both men back at the conference the next year or two.
When flying into a country, and even within a country, be very careful what you wear. A member care person we know flew into a country in a suit, tie, and shiny leather shoes, and he carried much American currency. After the missionaries had picked him and his wife up at the airport, someone followed their vehicle and forced them off the road several miles from the airport. They were robbed, and one of them was shot in the hand, but no one was killed.
We realized that when we enter most foreign countries many nationals will immediately recognize us as Americans and think of us as rich. I typically traveled in cargo pants, an old sweater or jacket (if needed), and worn athletic shoes. I carried my computer in my backpack rather than carrying in a computer case. Both of us tried to avoid wearing anything that would imply that we were wealthy.
Since checked baggage is sometimes lost, and frequently delayed, we divided our clothing in equal parts among all the suitcases we took. In the “good old days” when we could each take two 70-pound suitcases, we each packed a quarter of our clothes in each suitcase. If only one of the four suitcases arrived, we still had clothing for a few days.
We were staying with a missionary family in a relatively small town far from any large city. The sewer system carried only what was flushed down toilets, and the greywater flowed through the open gutters along the streets. The town was surrounded by dikes that had pumps to move the water outside the dikes when it rained. However, when it rained hard, the pumps could not keep up. When this happened the rainwater and greywater flooded the streets and the walled yard around the house.
We all just stayed in the house during those flood times and the small children played with the toys, put together puzzles, and read the books they had. We noticed that when they put a puzzle together they could pick up any piece, and they knew exactly where it went so that they could place it where it would fit in the finished puzzle—they had memorized the puzzle. They also had memorized nearly all the books and could “read” them without looking at the page. The oldest boy occasionally built things by nailing pieces of wood together.
One day he was in tears because he had lost a nail. We wondered why that was such a problem, until we found out that he had just six nails and could find only five! He routinely built things with pieces of wood and those six nails. Then when he wanted to build something else, he pulled out the nails and straightened them out by pounding them on a brick to build the new thing.
We learned that missionaries often do not take an antimalarial drug to prevent malaria. They probably do not do so because of potential side effects of those drugs. They usually take the chance of getting malaria and then seek a treatment. That may be wise for someone living for several years where malaria is found. However, such missionaries often tell visitors that there is no need to take anything to prevent malaria. Of course, everyone should take other steps to avoid mosquito bites, such as mosquito netting, insect repellent, avoiding wet places, staying inside at night if possible, etc.
Our most vivid example of this was when we went to Africa to help some missionaries. The family we went to help told us that the wife was a nurse, and none of them took any drug to prevent malaria. Knowing that this was common, and wanting to avoid malaria, we checked the CDC website, http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/ , found out that malaria was common there, and asked for the most effective drug available. We began taking that drug well before we flew to Africa, and we were glad we had done so.
As we drove into their driveway, they mentioned that their night guard had come down with malaria a couple days earlier. Their day guard was not sick (mosquitos that transmit malaria fly at night), but a couple days later the night guard next door also came down with malaria. We slept under netting, avoided outdoor activity at night, etc. during our time there.
After we arrived home in the states their youngest child had malaria and was undergoing treatment. Shortly after that we heard from them that there were no drugs that would cure his malaria in the country where they were serving, and they had to take the child to a nearby country where the child could be treated intravenously.
Many Independent agencies, but no denominations
Although many independent agencies have asked us to be available to their missionaries, no denominational mission agency ever did. We were careful to approach denominations whose theology was the same as ours. We told denominational missions about ourselves in a variety of ways. We met with denominational member care people at conferences and told them that we were available free of charge. We sent emails to people in charge of member care at headquarters. We even had the president of one denomination in our home for a meal. None ever asked us to do anything.
In one case we did spend a week on the field with the missionaries of a denomination; however, it was not because anyone from headquarters asked us. The invitation came from the field director who had met us while we were visiting that country, and he had become acquainted with us. We assume that he had received permission from headquarters to have us there, but the invitation did not come from headquarters, and we were never invited to any other field.
Occasionally missionaries preferred not to meet with us in our room, at the place provided for us to meet with people, or in their home. They would rather that others not know that they were seeing a counselor. In cases like that we had them suggest where they would feel the most at ease. The two most common places they wanted us to meet them were at parks or at restaurants.
Usually they had a favorite place in the park, and we walked to the park by ourselves and met them at the entrance if the park had one, or at an intersection at one corner of the park. Then we could sit and talk about whatever issues were of concern to them. If the weather was not good for meeting outside, too hot, too cold, or raining, missionaries would suggest a restaurant, and they would take us to their favorite booth or corner, and we could talk there.
We have made more than a dozen member care trips to Latin America as well as other trips to Europe, Africa, and Asia. Jet-lag to Latin America was minimal, but we were aware of its effects when traveling east and west. We had agreed to visit several missionaries in China. We assumed we would have time to adjust to the jet-lag. We asked for our itinerary several times but did not receive it (we found that the later a reservation is made the less it costs).
We arrived at our lodging in Beijing at 5:00 PM local time, just in time for a dinner. We left the next afternoon for Xining in northwest China, and during the following nine days we visited leaders in six cities from northeast to southwest China, over 7000 miles of travel in the country. Then we spent one day in Beijing and returned to the States where we again went through the jet-lag that comes from a 12-hour time change. We were certainly not at our best on that trip and may have hurt more than helped. From that time on we insisted on seeing our itinerary and making sure that it allowed adequate time for jet-lag.
Missionaries from many agencies
We met with missionaries from many agencies in various parts of the world. For example, we went to Bolivia once or twice a year for about a decade. During that time we met with a total of about 165 missionaries from many different agencies. We had an email distribution list of those missionaries and prayed each day for several of them so that we prayed at least once a month for each of them and their children.
We also sent birthday cards by snail mail to each missionary and each dependent child as well as cards to each married couple on their wedding anniversary. We also sent an email with “Praying for you…” on the subject line once a month to tell them that we had prayed for them.
During that time we went to Santa Cruz for ten days to two weeks and stayed in the guesthouse at the invitation of three different agencies to be available to their missionaries. At their request we made presentations to their missionaries as a group and met with couples, individuals, or families when they scheduled a time with us.
Whenever we went, we would email all 165 missionaries telling them that we were coming to Bolivia and they could make appointments with us personally. They could either come to meet with us at the agency where we were staying, or we could meet them somewhere nearby. We usually met with 30-35 missionaries serving with about five agencies on each trip, and most of them were from the agency where we were staying. They ranged from Swedish Pentecostals to Mennonites to Baptists to independent agencies of all types.
About 3:00 AM we awoke to the sound of a mosquito buzzing around our heads. When we turned a light on, we could see the mosquito on the wall of our hotel room. We swatted it with a folded newspaper, leaving a bloody spot on the wall, and we dozed off. A few minutes later this was repeated with another mosquito, then another. We realized then that they were getting into the room some way. We checked all the windows, and all were closed. But they kept coming into the room, buzzing around us, and landing on the wall. We could find no openings to the outside anywhere.
After the first three, they did not leave any bloody spots when we swatted them with the paper because we heard them, saw them, and killed them before they had a chance to bite us. We were traveling all over China, and we had not checked all areas of the country about malaria. However, we had just been in South America where malaria was prevalent, and we were still taking our final tablets of Lariam and were pretty sure that we did not have anything to worry about.
By 4:04 AM we had killed nine mosquitos and realized that trying to find and kill them all was hopeless. We always take our pillows with us when we travel, so we took the hotel pillow cases off of the pillows and put them over our heads and piled the pillows on us as much as possible. When daylight came, we looked again for the way mosquitos were getting in. We realized that all around the windows there was an opening of an inch or so because the climate was such that heat was not needed at any time. Mosquitos just came with the room.
We received an envelope with a return address to a small Illinois town we had never heard of and names we had never seen before. Inside was a generous check and nothing else. We thought it might be from former students or missionaries we had helped sometime in the past, but no one by those names was listed in the Asbury Alumni Directory nor was anyone in our list of people we had helped.
We wrote a thank you note to the couple who sent the check and apologized for not recognizing them if they were former students or missionaries we had helped. We also asked them if it was meant for us or if it was a donation for expenses of our ministry, and we included our phone number and email address.
A few days later we received the following answer:
“Just a note of explanation--we sent you a check recently. I apologize that in my rush out the door that day, I didn't enclose anything besides the check. I should have included a long overdue thank you note! You met with our daughter and son-in-law, xxxxx and xxxxx when they returned from a four year mission in xxxxx. You were without a doubt an answer to this mother's prayers. Re-entry was difficult and then multiple health issues and also fertility issues have made their return home a very difficult time. It has been heart breaking to watch all of the trials they have faced in their young lives. And yet they have given so much of themselves in His service. We are grateful that you were there for them, offering your most important ministry when they needed it so much. So it is with deep gratitude that we sent the small gift to you. Please use it wherever it is needed most for your ministry or it would certainly please us if you were able to use it to treat yourselves. Those of you in ministry should be able to follow Jesus' example of pulling away to rest and refuel occasionally!”
Never a “thank you” for alerting an agency
It is amazing what people write in an email to me as a result of visiting our websites. They may write thinking I will not know who sent the email, and they may disclose very personal information, especially about sexual matters. I always answer their emails and try to find out more about them, including what agency they are with. Several times I have alerted their agencies to sexual predators.
One email had “Horrible decision” on the subject line. It was from a married missionary with three children who wrote to say that he had committed adultery with the teenage daughter of a leader in the area where they were going to start a new work. As we corresponded, I encouraged him to confess to his wife and to his agency, which he did, and he went through a restoration program with his agency.
Another email had “Suicide” on the subject line. This was from a missionary who had an affair with the wife of another missionary. He was in the USA trying to break off the affair, and the woman was still on the field threatening suicide if he did not continue it. She already had a plan and the time set when she would do it. He also confessed to his agency, and the agency was able to get to the field before she did so. This missionary was dropped by the agency.
I always asked them to confess to their agencies and copy the email to me. Then I also sent copies of earlier emails to administrators of their agency myself to make sure they were aware of the situations. I have never received anything from an agency thanking me for telling them. Most of these were to well-known agencies or denominations.
A member care person in an agency asked us to meet as objective “outsiders” with a team working together in the same city. One of the young men on the team had recently become a believer, and he was very zealous about being a missionary.
The problem was that he had not studied the Bible enough to know what it said overall, and he tended to overgeneralize some things found in it. He had discovered Paul’s writing about women and men in 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2. He was insisting that women should be in submission to all men and that they should never teach or have authority if a man was present.
For example, even if his team was meeting in the apartment of a single woman, she should not pray if any man was present. If the team was walking down a sidewalk, no woman could be at the head of the group. Only a man could be the one leading the group.
Of course, this was a problem that occurred because of inadequate screening of candidates. The women (mostly single) in the group were offended by what he was doing. We wanted to help the group function in some way, so as a group we looked at some of the scriptures, and we said that they did not apply to a single woman submitting to a single man. That at least got the group functioning, and later the overzealous man was discipled enough to still be on the team when we met it again the next year.
I had told the provost at Asbury that I was going to quit teaching at the end of the academic year in 2002 so that the College could know how to plan for the future. At the end of the academic year in May of 2001, I sent my letter resignation to him so that he and the department could begin searching for my replacement. Since they knew I was planning on quitting, they began the search during that summer break by contacting some people they had in mind that would make a good replacement.
The morning of September 11, 2001, I was teaching psychology in a basement classroom under the chapel when a student came in and said, “An airplane just crashed into the World Trade Center.” Bonnie was at home painting the posts holding up the roof over the front porch when our telephone rang. Our daughter was calling from northern New Jersey, and she said, “Mom, turn your TV on and tell me what is happening, I can’t get any stations.” We watched over and over that day the replays when two airliners crashed into the Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and one into that field in Pennsylvania.
That was one of the times when we say, “What have we done?” I had turned in my resignation, and the college was in the process of looking for a replacement. I had given up tenure, and next summer I would be an unemployed 60-year old man. Although I continued to pay into our retirement program during the following year, at the end of 2002 the value of our retirement dropped. (That was 15 years ago, and our “portfolio” now is far larger than it was at the end of 2002. God is good and cares for his people)
When we began traveling across many time zones, we experienced jet-lag like most people do. On our trips to Asia we often completely switched day and night by the 12-hour time changes. We realized that we were not being fair to the missionaries we tried to help. We found many remedies available, and each remedy had its believers. We tried many of them, such as jet-lag diets, jet-lag chemicals like melatonin, jet-lag preventers such as doing much of the time change gradually before traveling, and a host of others.
We found that none of them worked reliably for us. From time to time one seemed to work, but on the next trip, it made no difference. We finally concluded that the best thing for us to do was to get to our destination and switch to the local time there, spending as much time as possible out in the sun. For example, if we arrived at 1:00 AM local time, we went to bed and set our alarm for 7:00 AM that time. We got up, showered, had breakfast, and spent the day outside at the zoo, walking around parks, etc. That did not reset our body clocks in one day, but it was probably better than anything else we tried.
We have often found it helpful to actually stay overnight in the homes of missionary families. When we do that, we can not only tell them what to do to solve problems but also be there when they try to do it. Here is an example.
We were staying in the home of a new mother who had no other expats from the USA to help her with parenting situations she faced with her infant. The husband was gone when she laid the baby in its bed and came back downstairs to talk with us. The baby began to cry, and she made repeated trips up to its room, but it always began crying when she came back down.
She told us that she did not know what to do because the nationals said babies should never cry. We explained to her that she was rewarding the baby’s crying each time she went back into its room. She said that she had tried just leaving the baby there, but it continued to cry, and she should not let it cry.
We said that we would be glad to be there with her while the crying extinguished, and she said she would like that. So we made sure the baby was fed, had a clean diaper on, no pins (before pampers), and so forth. Then we talked in the living room. Of course, the baby began to cry, and we urged the mother to stay with us (and I glanced at my watch). A time or two she mentioned that she should check on the baby, but we urged her not to. Finally, the baby stopped crying—and we stopped talking so we could listen. After a minute or so, I said, “That wasn’t bad. It was only nine minutes.”
The mother said, “Only nine minutes! I thought it was about two hours.” After a little more talking the mother said she should probably check on the baby, and we again discouraged her from doing so. If we had not been there to help her, she may have never extinguished the crying. Every time she saw us during the next few years, she thanked us over and over for helping her do that.
Sometimes we know of a solution and are able to respond immediately. Probably the most rapid solution occurred in June 2015. We were on the road returning to our home and arrived at our motel about 6:30 PM after 11 hours on the road (including visiting friends for lunch). We immediately left for something to eat. After we returned to our room, we checked our email. We found an email from a couple who had served as missionaries for 25 years and now had a very difficult situation with an adolescent. Here is the sequence of events.
6/15/15, 7:01 PM: Missionary: “We at this time feel we need some counseling about how to proceed to see our daughter restored…. Is it possible that you might find some time to give us some guidance in this crisis?”
6/15/15, 8:13 PM: Our reply: We are on the road and just received your email. Your situation is so complicated and has been so long in developing that it is something we cannot help you with from a distance. We suggest that you contact xxxxx in xxxxx…
6/15/15, 8:39 PM: “Thank you! I just sent the request to them on the website you recommended. My wife actually has attended some ladies Bible studies with some that are associated with this group…” The whole process took less than two hours!
At other times we did not know of a solution, and the solution came after we were contacted. Exactly one week after the above we were the afternoon presenters on a retreat for Korean missionaries. When we returned home at about 5:00 PM we received an email from a 22 year veteran missionary under an agency which had more than 400 families serving in other cultures but had no member care program. During the last eight years he had been a pastor in the USA. Here is the sequence of events.,
6/22/15 1:46 PM: Missionary: “I've approached my previous Missions Agency… and they have agreed to begin a much needed missionary care program. My wife and I are that beginning….I was wondering if you might be willing to open a dialogue on this subject?
6/22/15 7:42 PM: My reply: “Sure, I would be willing to dialogue with you. I write and serve missionaries on the field and do not claim to be an expert on the structure of a member care program, but I will be glad to tell you what I know….”
The next morning we gave two presentations at the retreat. Just as we were finishing the second one, Laura Mae Gardener and her husband arrived to continue the retreat. We had lunch together, and she gave us a copy of her new book, Healthy, Resilient, & Effective in Cross-Cultural Ministry: A Comprehensive Member Care Plan.
6/23/15 2:33 PM: My email to the Missionary: I described what had happened and sent a link to get the book and said, “Of course, I would still be glad to dialog with you, but this is the finest thing (the only thing) available.”
6/23/15 3:40 PM: Missionary: “Thanks so much for getting back with me, and sharing the great information!”
In just a little over 24 hours later he could order the book which I did not even know existed!
A couple who both served with the same agency was planning to marry. They served in different countries in Asia hundreds of miles apart. Each year their agency had a conference that involved everyone in the agency, hundreds of teachers. We had attended that conference several times, and when they became engaged, they asked for premarital counseling.
We used the Prepare/Enrich materials when counseling couples planning to marry. The questionnaire can be taken online, so the bride-to-be too took it in northern Asia, and the husband-to-be took it in southern Asia. The results were sent to us in the USA. Then we all met at another country in Asia to discuss the results.
They married, and we continued seeing them at that conference through the years as their family grew. We live in a day in which we can use technology to do things never imagined by missionaries a century ago.
Shortly after the turn of the century, I began considering publishing the brochures as a book. While reading everything I could find on member care as recorded in the database, I had decided that the best style was that found in EMQ, so I had written the brochures that way. Also, EMQ had published more member care articles than any other publication I had found. Therefore, the logical place to start was with Kenneth Gill, Director of EMIS (Evangelical Missions Information Service) which published EMQ. In 2001 I wrote a brief email to ask if he would be interested in seeing a proposal. He replied that he would, but that EMIS was not in a position to “take on another project for some time.” I was disappointed, but hopeful.
In 2003, I wrote to him again, and he asked to see a proposal. I sent a proposal, and he replied listing five reasons why it would not sell well. He said that he was not able to refer the proposal to another publisher because he did not know any who would be likely to accept it. He said that I already had it in the best place to reach missionaries on the field, on the web. Of course, I was disappointed at the time, but I am so grateful that he rejected the idea of publishing it as a printed book. That fall we posted it on missionarycare.com, and since that time, people have downloaded more than 40,000 copies of that book free of charge!
An interesting event occurred six years later. In 2009 I wrote to Dr. Gill to thank him for rejecting my proposal and for encouraging me to keep posting brochures and books on the Internet. To my surprise, he replied very angry with me for posting all those EMQ articles on the internet without permission which was breaking copyright law! I knew that I had written every article myself and had broken no law, that even the editor of EMQ had said that my member care resources were some of the best available. Dr. Gill immediately replied with an apology saying that he had read them only quickly and thought they were from EMQ. I was elated that even the director of the organization publishing EMQ thought they were from it. I had succeeded in imitating the EMQ style beyond my wildest dreams.
At the beginning of every reentry retreat for an agency, or at the beginning of debriefing missionaries in our home or at the GO InterNational office, we gave them information about ourselves including this statement: “Ordinarily anything shared with us is held in confidence with the exception of the following. (1) Intention to harm yourself or others. (2) Reports of abuse. (3) Court order to reveal something. (4) Intention to sabotage the mission agency.” The first three are usual in many situations, but the fourth one was to let them know that we would not tolerate things that would harm the missionary enterprise generally. We usually elaborated by saying that if they were having an affair or embezzling funds and intended to continue, we would report that to the agency. If they had an affair or embezzled years ago but had stopped it, made restitution, and asked God’s forgiveness, we would not report it.
A director of member care asked us to do a reentry retreat with the agency’s missionaries. As we talked he/she mentioned attending the retreat as we facilitated it. We objected to that and discussed it at length. We finally pointed out that the only thing we had that he/she did not was that we were from outside the agency. However, she/he finally said that if we would not agree to him/her being present we would not do the retreat. We reluctantly agreed, and facilitated the retreat.
During the first session, everyone around the table gave a very short introduction limited to name, where they serve, and their type of service. All seemed normal during that session, and one man said, “My name is John Doe, and I am Field Director in England” (name and country changed here). However, he never said another word in the following seven sessions during those two days. When he did not participate during the second session, I approached him during lunch time, and he said everything was OK, but he just did not have anything to say. At the end of the day it was apparent to everyone that John was not participating.
The director of member care approached me saying that there must be something wrong with John and asking what we should do. I told the director that I had talked with John and did not find anything wrong. The director said that she/he thought that something needed to be told to personnel and wondered if she/he should do something. I reminded him/her that I had said I would not report anything other than the four items. I did not know what she had told them.
Other than that, the retreat went very well. The next year we were asked to do the reentry retreat again. The director of member care did not even ask to come!
We were expecting a very good reentry retreat because the participants were eleven people from five countries on four continents with most between 40 and 65 years of age. A diverse group of this size usually resulted in good sharing. However, during the first session someone nearing retirement said something like, “I believe that people who have problems reentering have spiritual problems, not psychological problems.” Although Bonnie and I tried to overcome the results of this statement, very few missionaries shared in the group the rest of that day. If they talked about their problems, they would have been viewed as “unspiritual.”
At the beginning of the second day, during the fifth session, another missionary close to retirement asked, “During most of your retreats do people share more than we do?” When I replied that people usually shared more about issues, he asked if they were younger than this group. When I replied that they were, he said that people their age did not need to share because they were more mature and took care of issues before they left the field. Now anyone who shared would be seen as being both “immature” and “unspiritual.”
After that fifth session a missionary in her 40s called us aside and asked if we knew what was going on. I replied, “I don’t have a clue!” She told us that, although they were now from several countries, most of the missionaries there had served in the country where she was now, and many of them had unresolved issues with others present!
We were rather apprehensive about a reentry retreat because it included only six participants, three couples, and two of the couples were from the same country. This small a group with two thirds of the participants from the same country usually resulted in little sharing. However, this group began sharing very early in the retreat and was one of the best retreats we ever had.
After the worship session, the eighth session, we closed with prayer. Bonnie and I began gathering our things and packing them to take to the car. The six missionaries continued talking with each other. After a while the people fixing the final meal together came over to the building where we held the retreat and said that the pizza was ready.
The six missionaries continued to talk together as we put things in our car. After a few more minutes, the people fixing the meal came and said that if we all did not come over right away everyone else was going to start eating without us. The missionaries still did not want to stop talking and eat. As one put it, “Where can we find people with such great missionary stories to tell, and who will listen to our stories like these people here?”
We were willing to go nearly anywhere to meet with missionaries, and we have traveled many thousands of miles to help individuals, couples, and families. When we did so, we insisted that their agency and their field director knew that we were coming and why we were coming.
One time a couple we knew quite well contacted us to see if we would come to their host country to meet with them about a family issue. We had stayed in their home overnight on previous visits to their host country, so we knew that they needed help in that area. We also knew that they had read several books and attended several conferences on that issue, and that had not helped.
We replied that we would be glad to come if we could stay in their home while we worked on the issue with them. They replied that they had in mind that they would come to a large city that we could fly into from the USA, and we could all meet at a five star hotel and talk around the pool.
We told them that we believed that they needed something more than could be done sitting around the pool, and we would not come at that time. It all turned out well because the field finally required that the whole family go to Link Care for help. They found so much help there that they convinced one of their parents to go to Link Care as well. We remain good friends to this day.
If the agency had a set schedule, we cooperated with that. The most frequent schedule we found was based on one hour time slots. That meant that for people we did not know, we would have about 50 minutes to meet them, hear about the issue bothering them and give suggestions to solve it. This was seldom adequate, and we suggested to people who wanted to return that they schedule two hours. These agencies nearly always had adequate time set aside for us to rest.
If we were with an agency who told us to schedule people who wanted to see us, we usually divided the day into four slots available to meet people.
Of course, we did not meet for three hours, but we had that time available if we needed it. People who wanted to take us out or have us in their home could do so. Those who would rather not feed us could meet at different times. We always reserved one of those four slots for us to rest. As soon as three of them were filled, we literally wrote our own names in the fourth slot and told people that we could not meet during that time because we had something on our schedule.
Jesus said we could not serve two masters or we would get into love-hate relationships. I thought of it as being a choice between God and something else, such as money. I had missed the phrase between these things.
The same year I quit working at Asbury College our church needed a missions pastor, a part-time position. I thought that I would have lots of “free” time because I was not yet really into member care; so I agreed to take the position for a year. Both missionary member care and missions pastor seemed to be about similar things. However, in just a few months, I realized my mistake. The missions pastor position seemed to take time away from what God had called me to do in member care (my fault). Before the year was half gone, I had told the church I would not do it another year. The phrase I missed in Matthew 6:24 was, “He will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” “Despise” seemed too strong a word, but I did not like it.
For about five years, I devoted all my time to member care, and then the missions committee asked Bonnie and me to join it, and we agreed to try it for a year. It seemed like such a small thing, and it did not take a lot of time, but I again knew that it was not the thing for me to do. It interfered with my time to think and took some emotional energy that I needed for member care. At the end of that year, I notified the committee that I would be glad to help the committee on any given issue, but I did not want to be on the committee again.
Dawson Trotman, founder of the Navigators, said something that was a great help in making such decisions. It went something like, “Never do anything that someone else can and will do, when there is so much of importance to be done which others cannot or will not do.” God had called me to care for missionaries when very few others were doing that, and I did not want even good things to interfere.
When we visited missionaries in their host countries, we often arrived early to see some of the local sights. When traveling to Latin America, we usually allowed only a day or two. However, when traveling east or west, we often allowed a week or so to begin to get over jet lag. Thailand was exactly half way around the world, so we usually arrived about a week early. The first couple times we spent that week in Bangkok seeing the sights there in the capital before flying on to Chiang Mai.
After that we asked our travel agent to get us to the island of Phuket further south on the Andaman Sea. She did so and found lodging for us in Patong, the most popular destination on Phuket. Our Lonely Planet guidebook described it as “a seething concentration of souvenir shops, sleazy girlie bars,…and plenty of bare skin to go along with the exciting day and nightlife ….You might want to think twice about bringing your young kids into this town.”
We contacted our travel agent and told her that we would rather not stay in a town where we would not want to bring children. She soon found us reservations in a hotel in Karon which advertised itself as family friendly and “only six kilometers from the sizzling night life of Patong.” We had a delightful time there on the beautiful beach.
We had many “small world” experiences, but the one spread over several years and several continents is a favorite. Someone we had met in Bolivia at least a decade previously wrote to ask for a copy of a book I had written. I noticed that he lived in Elkhart, (very close to South Bend) IN. So I wrote, “Our oldest son just joined the Bethel College faculty, after 21 years in pastoral ministry. He is now Assistant Professor of Christian Ministry, and our granddaughter is a freshman there! Keith and LeAnne (his wife) bought a home on the south side of South Bend, close to Bethel.”
The man wrote back, “Both of our sons graduated from Bethel (2012 and 2013). One of them still lives less than ½ mile from campus. We have a daughter who graduated from IPFW in Ft Wayne. I believe Keith was the pastor for some close family friends in Ft Wayne and conducted the funeral for our friend (xxxxx) when he passed away.
Keith remembered the funeral well and said, “I was, indeed, the pastor who did xxxxx xxxxx’s funeral a number of years ago. I visited xxxxx prior to his death many times in the hospital and nursing home as he suffered through dementia or Alzheimers during those last couple of years. Small world!
I usually wrote brochures or books in response to suggestions missionaries made or problems we dealt with in our counseling. As we came up with a number of issues married couples faced, I finally wrote a set of brochures which became the chapters of the Missionary Marriage Issues book.
After those brochures and the book were posted, I started getting suggestions to write something for single missionaries as well. I replied to each of these suggestions noting the following things. First, Bonnie and I were not singles. Second, we were married at 22 years of age right after college, so we had not lived as singles. Third, we had done little counseling with singles, so we were not really aware of what needed to be written.
That seemed to satisfy most people; however, a few years later an older single lady just would not take “No” for an answer. She pointed out that I was ignoring a quarter of the missionary force, and that should not be. She wrote back several times bringing up other reasons why I should write it. I finally agreed to do so under one condition, and that was that she would continue to make suggestions and critique everything I wrote about singles.
She commented on the first few brochures, and then did not reply when I sent more. By then I was into the book and found another single who would critique what I wrote. Months later, when I finished the book, I sent her a copy and asked for her input.
She wrote back something like, “Well, I met this man….” She had gone to the funeral of a friend of hers who had passed away, and there she began to get reacquainted with the lady’s husband…… You know the rest of the story.
One of the things I have enjoyed during member care service is when the people we were serving felt they knew us well enough to play jokes on me. Here are a couple of my favorites.
While I was still teaching psychology, a TCK was in my general psychology course in which I had used the example of something that happened when I was taking the same course the students were in. The course was taught just before lunch, and we were eager to get out before the 11:50 AM bell that ended the class time. That would get us to the cafeteria ahead of the long lines.
It was during the winter, and we noticed that the professor was dismissing the class when we began putting our coats on rather than when the bell rang. So we appointed a student sitting in the first row to put his coat on whenever he thought we should get out of class to go to lunch. We did that day after day, earlier and earlier. We knew the stimulus that elicited his response of dismissing class. Unfortunately, one day we were leaving class at 11:30 AM just as the half-hour chimes rang, and the professor looked at his watch. Cognitive factors took over, and that was the last time we got out early.
Students in my class said they could do the same thing to me. I quickly said that would not work because I did not dismiss class when the bell rang but when my digital watch was approaching the time to end the class. I always kept the watch on the edge of the overhead projector so that I would know exactly how much time was left in the class. A few days later, during the class, I noticed that time was nearly gone and mentioned how fast time had gone that day. I hurried through the remaining minutes and dismissed the class. As the last students were leaving, they mentioned how they had fooled me. I picked up the watch and told them that they had not and that the bell would ring any second.
However, they were right. Without my noticing it, a TCK sitting in the front row right in front of the projector had removed my watch, set the time ten minutes faster, and I had dismissed the class when I thought it was near the time to do so. Of course, the next day I complimented him on learning and applying the principles talked about a few days earlier.
Theological differences: Denominations
A leader of the member care area for a denomination talked with us at a member care conference about helping them with a series of three member care retreats for workers in North Africa, the Middle East, and southern Asia. We discussed dates, what we would be expected to do, and how expenses would be shared. As member care providers, we agreed on everything we talked about.
I had not met him before. I noticed that he served with a denomination that had theological differences with ours, and I asked if that would make any difference. He replied that it would not. He said, “We don’t know whether we have it or not, but we know that if we have it we will never lose it. You are sure you have it, but you are afraid you might lose it.” That was one of the best short summaries of our differences, and I told him so. As we parted he said he would check with his boss and contact me soon.
However, knowing what I did, I told Bonnie that we would never hear from him again, and we did not.
Theological differences: Independent Agencies
Independent agencies also had their preferred theological positions, but we found them open to differences. In one case, a field director of an agency got acquainted with us when we were in the country with another agency. He and his executive team had met with us over dinner, and they decided that they would like to have us come and spend a week at their guest house in a few months. The field director wanted us to talk with the agency president based here in the USA.
We discussed primarily our approach to counseling and psychology, and theological differences with the president. After about an hour of answering many questions, I asked the president if he could approve us to talk with his missionaries. I could tell that we were not in complete agreement, but I felt comfortable planning to meet with their missionaries.
The president replied, ‘We are on opposite sides of the line that goes down the middle of the road, but we seem close enough to the line to work together.” We met with them and had a good week of ministry.
When we first began facilitating reentry retreats, we did not realize that many missionaries had never met some of the people in their own agency. At that time the usual five-year cycle of service was four years on the field and one year at “home,” so they got to meet about 20% of the other missionaries. Of course, today there is no “usual” cycle, so they do have opportunities to meet a larger percentage of other missionaries; however, they still seldom meet all the others.
This was brought home to us when two missionary families were spending their home ministry assignment here in Wilmore where we live. The two husbands were watching a parade in town when they began talking with each other. In the conversation one mentioned that he was a missionary.
The other said, “I’m a missionary too.
The first replied, “That’s great, where are you a missionary to?”
The other said, “I’m a missionary to XXXX.”
The first replied, “I’m a missionary to YYYYY.”
The other missionary asked, “What agency are you with?”
The first replied, “I serve with ZZZZZ.”
They both served with the same agency, and they found out that they lived only four houses apart on the same street. When they gave their names, they knew a lot about each other from the agency’s publication, from memos received, etc. Both had served several terms, but they had never met.
Most of our work has been done with a relatively small number of missionaries present, so we were the only counselors there. However, several times we have been asked to be at conferences were there were several hundred missionaries. At times, the conference directors have had too many counselors so that the counselors have much free time. The most common cause of this is that the spouse of one of the conference speakers is also a counselor and wants to be “useful” while there.
In one case, we had been with a group that held their conference at a conference center in the mountains, far from anything to do outside the center. After serving several years there, the venue was changed to a large hotel downtown in a large city, and fewer missionaries attended. That time we had much free time, as did the other counselors. The next year we did not attend that conference and told the group they had too many counselors.
Then the group seemed to make the adjustment, and we went several more years with good schedules. However, the group then had more counselors, and our load was very small again. We calculated that we spent about $400 for airfare, and we were in the air four hours for every hour we spent counseling. When they asked us to return another year, we said we would be glad to do so if they agreed to limit the number of counselors. They said they could not do that, so we stopped going to that conference.
We learned that missionaries often become accustomed to life in conditions of unrest, and it becomes so routine that they do not realize that it is dangerous. We became most aware of this when we offered our house for a couple weeks to a missionary who had just returned to the states while we were out of the country on a member care trip. We had told her how to get into our house because we were not here when she came, and she was gone when we returned. Soon after we came into the house, we noticed the low battery sound from the smoke detector just outside our bedroom door. We called her to apologize for disturbing her sleep while she was here. She said that it did not bother her at all because it was so much better than the gunshots around her home overseas.
Missionaries may become so accustomed to danger that they do not think to tell member care people about it. We have found it very helpful to get more objective information from the state department at http://travel.state.gov/content/passports/english/alertswarnings.html. This website gives travel alerts which are short-term events which the traveler needs to know, such as political or health issues that go away in a few weeks or months. It also provides travel warnings about countries with long-term issues which have lasted for months or years. As you might expect, travel warnings have been in place for Afghanistan and Iraq for many years. Warnings such as these are to be taken seriously and heeded in many situations.
However, some travel warnings are for specific long-term events that occur for long times in only specific parts of a country. Rather than just not going to countries with travel warnings, we learned to contact the missionaries and ask what it is like where we are going. We question them about particular things that are happening right there at that time and in the immediate past.
Anyone flying about 50,000 miles a year will encounter turbulence in the air at times. Our worst turbulence was not in some other country, but right here in Kentucky. We had just returned from South America and were in Dayton, Ohio, ready for the last hour-long flight to Lexington. The flight was over-booked, and we volunteered to be bumped so that we could get a free trip anywhere in the States. It was early evening, and there were seats available on the next flight, so we would be home by bedtime.
It was a stormy night, and we were on a small plane with only about a dozen passengers. Most of the other passengers looked like businessmen heading home. It was very windy, but nothing we hadn’t experienced before. However, as we crossed the Kentucky River, the storm hit with a vengeance. The plane was thrown about more than we had ever experienced. People on the plane were either silent or talking quietly. One of the businessmen suddenly lost it and started shouting things like, “O! God, we’re all going to die. I knew I should have rented a car and driven.” He buried his face in his hands and wept. We were praying we would make it home safely—and we did.
Even though it was a stressful trip, we thoroughly enjoyed our free trip to Seattle and week camping there in the northwest.
Although I was qualified to use many psychological tests, the two most useful ones for me are the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS). I kept copies of both of these instruments in an envelope ready to put in my backpack whenever I went to visit a field. Depression is so common among the general population that I knew that I was very likely to meet someone who was depressed. I wanted something that took only a few minutes to take and score that I could do that during a session. Both of these instruments consist of about 20 items and take only 5-10 minutes to complete and score.
The BDI is widely available on the Internet and gave me a quick indication of how depressed the person was. Three versions of it have been developed over the years, and anyone can score it and see from the score how serious the depression is, and whether or not the person could handle the situation and whether or not the person needed a referral. Also very useful were two questions on the inventory which gave indications of whether or not the person might be suicidal and may need immediate supervision and a quick referral.
If the suicide indicators were checked, then I asked the person to complete the BHS. This instrument is not available on-line, but it was very useful to better ascertain whether or not the person needed immediate supervision and help. If that was the case, I would alert the person’s supervisor there on the field to the danger.
Member care workers may misinterpret what missionaries say and give unwanted answers or suggestions. I did this when visiting a missionary family on the field. We were eating in a restaurant and during our conversation one of the parents said something like, “I wish I knew what to do when my children…” I interpreted that to mean that she wanted us to give them some suggestions about what they could do.
I proceeded to make several suggestions based on what I had observed in the day or two we had spent with them. The couple did not say anything about what I had said and conversation went on. I thought I had said some things that would help them. However, I was wrong. When we went to their home the next morning, the mother was in tears at breakfast. I did not know that I was the one who had caused the tears.
I learned that day that missionaries really want suggestions only when they have asked for them specifically. From that time on, I asked some questions of my own before offering advice. Fortunately, the couple accepted my apology, and we were able to visit them again the next year, and I was more careful what I said.
Because we did not get involved in long-term therapy we asked that agencies not require their missionaries to come to us and insisted that the missionaries contact us themselves. We wanted to make sure that time spent with them would help, so we asked them if they wanted to talk with us or if they were just coming because of pressure from their agency. We usually asked to talk personally with both husband and wife, but occasionally one of those was not available to talk.
A husband called to ask if we would meet with him and his wife sometime. We said we would be glad to do so, but we wanted to be sure that they really wanted to come. He assured us that both of them did, so we agreed to meet with them. As they came through our door, the wife remarked that she was glad we could meet with them so that they could get this marked off their list of things to do! Of course, that session went nowhere and seemed like it was a waste of time. We decided that we would insist always on talking with both before agreeing to meet.
To our surprise, about a decade later we got an email from the husband, and he wanted to meet with me. We met several times, and those times were very fruitful. If we had not had that “waste of time” with the couple, we may not have ever been of help to him.
Weapons of Mass Destruction (war)
We were scheduled to begin our time as International Pastors to WGM Bolivia in March of 2003. We had our tickets to depart the morning of March 23 and were scheduled to be there three and a half weeks to give us time to visit most of the WGM missionaries living in various parts of Bolivia. When the USA began its preemptive strike on Iraq, we were uncertain about what to do. We did not know what would happen on the world scene.
We wondered how wide the conflict might become. What would Saddam Hussein do if he really had weapons of mass destruction? How would the rest of the world react to our country invading a much smaller one when there had been no attack of us? Even more, how would the government in Bolivia react? What about the people in Bolivia, since we would obviously standout? What if the conflict spread so that we would not be able to return to the USA?
With many misgivings we flew to Santa Cruz with nothing unusual occurring. The field director and his wife met us. There were no obvious problems, and the most difficult question for us from the national Christians who were asking, “If George Bush is a Christian, how can he attack a country who has done nothing to the USA?”
What if nobody ever asks us to do anything?
As the time approached when I planned to quit teaching, Bonnie began to occasionally ask, “What if nobody ever asks us to do anything?” Of course, we both knew that we would be asked to do a few things because that was already the case. The real question was, what if very few agencies asked us to do very few things? We were quitting right at the peak of our earnings, and we did have some concern about only a few opportunities developing to be worth it.
My reply to Bonnie was always, “We can go down and volunteer at Red Bird Mission and Henderson Settlement.” These were two missions in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky where we had volunteered several times to help the people of Appalachia. They were both good ministries, and we had made acquaintances at both.
When we had resources (brochures and database) posted on our website, we wanted to know how to increase activity to reach more missionaries. We were in uncharted waters, so we tried a variety of things that we thought would help.
By then I knew what would not work. All of these attempts took time and/or money. Then in fall of 2010 Brigada Today contained an item about one of the free books on missionarycare.com, and the number of books downloaded that month. I thought that it was a rather poorly worded item, but the results were incredible. This led to the following which are all free and rather easy.
Brigada Today is received weekly by thousands of people interested in missions. The GMCN Newsletter is received monthly by over a thousand people interested in missionary member care. The GMCN Facebook group is a closed group of more than 1700 people interested in missionary member care.
Will we have enough money for international travel and other ministry expenses?
As we approached going into missionary member care full-time as volunteers, we pondered what we would do about finances for expenses, especially for airfares to people overseas. We decided that we would again trust God for those. As we wrote letters to hundreds of people to raise prayer support, we promised that we would never ask them for money—all we wanted were their prayers. We did say that if they wanted to make a contribution to our work, they could ask us how to do so. We wrote letters to everyone on such things as our Christmas card list, people we worked with at the college, people who attended our church, and the hundreds of psychology majors I had taught over the years.
About 150 people offered to pray for us, and about 50 of those asked how they could donate funds for expenses. We told those who asked about donating where to send the funds for a tax deductible receipt, and we also told them that we would never ask for money. However, we also told them that with every prayer letter, we would tell them exactly how much was in our expense account, and they could decide whether or not they wanted to add to that.
One of the things that we noticed was that many of those were retired missionaries who said something like, “Where were you when we needed you?” We went to the funeral of one of our retired missionary supporters. When we greeted one of her grandchildren there and told her that her grandmother was one of our faithful supporters, she said, “I know. I wrote the checks.”
We were amazed at how the money came in for our expenses. During the years that we were traveling overseas several times a year, our account usually had a balance of $20,000 or more. Sometimes we would say, “I don’t know if I would give to people who had that much.” However, we never did need to pay airfare to get anywhere. One evening we were attending a program at Asbury when we met a family who had two children who had been in Bonnie’s elementary class at school. Those boys wanted to support us. So we put them on our list and were so humbled to receive an envelope every now and then over several years with a few one dollar bills. We always thought about the poor widow that Jesus had said gave more than all the others because they gave out of their wealth, but she put in all she had.
Will we have enough money to live on?
When we were 50 and decided that we were to quit working and go into member care full-time, we faced the decision about when we would do. I began my respecialization program at the University of Kentucky that year so that I would have training in counseling psychology, and Bonnie began working on her credentials in education. We noticed that Psalm 90:10 said, “The length of our days is seventy years—or eighty if we have the strength.” We also noticed that people past the age of 70 began to have serious, chronic illnesses; so we decided tentatively to quit working for a salary when we turned 60. That would give us a decade to prepare, and perhaps God would give us a decade of fruitful ministry to missionaries.
That meant that we had ten more years of our regular income, and then we would have to live on what God provided. Bonnie had not worked full time since I started teaching full-time, and I would not be paying into my Social Security and retirement program at Asbury during the years of my highest salary. Plus we would have to have funds to live on before we could begin drawing Social Security two years after we quit working. We did begin a supplemental annuity into which we could put aside some funds for those two years.
Seven or eight years later I had completed the respecialization program at UK, and Bonnie had a lifetime Kentucky teaching certificate as well as an ACSI teaching certificate. However, we found that we didn’t even use up all of the money we had in our supplemental annuity when we began getting Social Security at 62, and after more than a dozen years we still have a net worth which is far greater than we had when we quit at age 60. God is a faithful provider.
One day we were crossing a busy street inside the first ring in the center of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, when we barely made it across. From behind we heard someone behind us say something like, “That was close, wasn’t it?” in English. We turned to see who it was, and it was an American we had never met before. After brief introductions, we told him that we were there to provide member care for missionaries and gave him our card. We were both staying at the same guesthouse, and when he read our card he asked if he could talk with us that evening because he had an appointment in just a few minutes.
When we met that evening, he said that he had noticed that I was professor emeritus at Asbury College, and he wondered if we knew Dick Reznick who taught there. Of course, we knew Dick well, and we asked about his connection with Dick. When he was an undergraduate at a university in Ohio, Dick was teaching there and was with Intervarsity. It was under Dick’s ministry there that he was saved, and he had been a missionary to Ethiopia for 20 years before coming to serve in Bolivia. His ministry was primarily in providing water for people.
We asked if he would like to have his name and those of his family on the list of missionaries we prayed for each morning after breakfast and sent birthday and anniversary cards each year. He did, and he gave us names, birthdays, and an address. We prayed for them and sent cards for the next decade, continuing even after they returned to the USA about the time their “children” entered college. They put us on their mailing list so that we knew about their family and their ministry, including his teaching in the engineering department at Cedarville College and taking students on mission trips to Bolivia to provide water.
When one of our grandsons in high school expressed an interest in engineering, we sent him a book about a missionary engineer and included one of those prayer letters. Just last week as our grandson packed to go to Cedarville in engineering, he packed the book and letter saying, “It just seemed right that I should take this book with me since that’s how I first learned about Cedarville.” You never know how God might work over three decades in events in both hemispheres.