Voices from the Field - C and J
by C and J
MRI Field Coordinator (C)
and former workers in Rwanda
What do I wish my church had known about me, my family, or my work during my time on the field?
I still remember the night we arrived in Rwanda 17 years ago. I was a brash 23-year-old full of ambition and nerves, and J was six months pregnant with our first. Looking back, I would say that ignorance was blissfully necessary and that stepping off the plane into a whole new world that night was scary. The memories that materialize from those moments are written in fatigue from the long wait for the bags that did not come, of J passing out in the airport, and of a cricket-filled quiet wafting through permeable windows of that late African night.
We are still at it, though we have been removed from that first night for years. Now we have two teenage humans in tow, live in a new country, and are forever-changed people. Through all the adventure, moments of grief, and the transformation that was demanded, I’ve realized that these years would not have been possible without the faithful and loving network of support that has weathered both our journey and us. We are forever grateful.
As I sit down to think about what I wish our supporters would have known, I have rather stumbled on several things that I wish ‘I’ had known about our support network.
I wish I had known that some of those “investors” would one day adorn familial names of endearment by my children and be cherished as the deepest of friends. I wish I had approached and treated them as such earlier.
I wish I had known that our lives and belongings would, at times, explode into their living rooms; that “home assignment” would leave us wearied and with bloodshot eyes in desperate need of space to repack a summer of accumulated belongings and unpack a season of accumulated feelings.
I wish I had known how crucial to our mental health (and sanity) it would be to have safe spaces to share both our wins and our losses.
I also wish I had taken the time to pray more for those who were praying for us and that I had stayed connected better to the unfolding seasons of their lives (maybe they should write us newsletters, too).
That said, there are a few things that J and I wish our support network would also know. The following list proceeds from the freshness of this season as we are in the process of doing it all over again and are 2 ½ years into a whole new world.
We wish our network knew how tough it is to become functional in another language. We wish they could understand how much time and pain it entails, how many moments of vulnerability it demands, and how defeating it feels to lose the ability to function on autopilot in nearly every domain of life simultaneously when one enters a new context.
We wish they knew that the hardest part about moving to a new country for us isn’t what or who we do not know (even though that is super hard, too), but rather that you yourself are not known and, often, that you are not even knowable until you’ve acquired the tools of connection and passed the threshold of time that trust demands.
We wish they would value all the mundane aspects of our lives that build knowability, trust, and relationships as much as they would value ‘success.’ Recognizing that those aspects will be the structural support from which any ‘success’ is built. We want them to know that in our minds, our work isn’t just about accomplishing something with people; it is also about our delight in and relationship with those people. Those we serve are friends, not statistics or stories; without this, we would not want to be here.
We wish that they would see how little control we have over people’s faith journeys and how bankrupt the scientific worldview of cause and effect is in the arena of Christian mission. Models are great, but a + b does not always = c.
We wish they would ask more open-ended questions and lean in deeply to our excitement or trepidation. “What was that like?” “Tell me more!” “How did that happen?”
We wish they knew how much pressure we sometimes feel to tell (or rather to sell) a story to justify our work. We wish they knew that even the most experienced of us are vulnerable to the whispers and wonders of whether we are frauds and if the pound of flesh we have put in and the effort we have poured out is enough to merit approval from God or them. We especially wish they knew how much a disinterested reply, or worse, a disappointed response, can amplify those whispers louder.
Lastly, we wish they knew how important a legitimate reason for living abroad is. We wish they understood that the degree to which we can be open and honest about who we are and what we do is the degree to which we can share the gospel – thus, we must have authentic and credible reasons for why we are living where we are; and that in many places in the world, being a “Christian Worker” is not a credible identity.
To conclude, we were reminded just this morning of how complicated and anonymous much of our lives are. We just left the bank where we were opening a business account to maintain residency and justify our legitimate reason for being here. We were grilled in Arabic and French, and while my hand was doing gymnastics filling out forms in front of inpatient bankers, my brain was cramping from responding appropriately to the barrage of questions in multiple languages.
This life feels complex, fragile, sometimes dangerous, and always adventurous; it is not stable or certain. However, good supporters (like ours) provide the stability and confidence that give us the courage to give ourselves away to this beautiful and broken world.
And for that, we are forever indebted.
C and J