Living among choice saints disguised as regular folks

 

I’d always planned to chase the American Dream—I’d marry a guy who’d earn more money next year than this year. And more money each year after that. And we’d get a bigger, nicer house every so often. And increasingly nice furniture and carpets. New cars, too.

 

And I expected we’d continue our pursuit of happiness—which the Declaration of Independence says is our right. I assumed gaining more and better possessions would lead to that happiness.

 

Abundance. Upward mobility. Living the good life. During my lifetime, the American Dream has been so pervasive in our values, assumptions, and expectations that we have allowed it to be a comfortable, acceptable part of Christianity.

 

In my circles, including my church circles, that was the thing to do—that was the way we lived—so when I was a kid and a young wife and mother, I assumed all of that would be mine. I never questioned those goals. I never questioned my motives for pursuing them. 

 

What a shock it would have been for me if, back then, I had read David Wilkinson’s words in The Prayer of Jabez: “Do we really understand how far the American Dream is from God’s dream for us? We’re steeped in a culture that worships freedom, independence, personal rights, and the pursuit of pleasure.” 

 

And then God sent me to Lomalinda in rural Colombia.

 

Lomalindians thought little of North America’s material trappings. For the most part, they had freed themselves, choosing to be satisfied with skimpy physical creature comforts, willing to overlook inconveniences.

 

I sensed no competition to outdo each other in vehicles, possessions, houses, or décor. They built homes where marriages and children could thrive, where they spent fun times with friends-that-became-like-family.

 

If they’d ever craved a big income, a fancy house, and early retirement, they’d set aside those dreams. They lived at peace with themselves.

 

Our population included charming, good-looking men and lovely, capable ladies. Most folks were clean and attractive but had little concern about the latest clothing trends. People returning from furlough brought back the latest fashions and hairdos, but the materialism frenzy did not flame throughout the community.

 

People worked hard—sometimes too hard. They showed kindness and gentleness and generosity.

 

They enjoyed playing volleyball and softball and taking motorbike trips and singing and playing instruments.

 

They also cried together and prayed together and rejoiced together and grieved together and cheered each other on.

 

God had sent our family to live with some three hundred colleagues who, I would soon learn, served Him with zeal. It’s not that they talked about God all the time or spoke in hallowed tones or prayed a lot in public.

 

No, they were ordinary souls who chose a humble lifestyle so they could live a radical faith, despite consequences that would come their way.

 

“While Christians choose to spend their lives

fulfilling the American dream

instead of giving their lives to proclaiming the kingdom of God,

literally billions in need of the gospel remain in the dark.”

(David Platt, Radical, published in 2010)

 

Half a century or so before Platt penned those words,

the Lomalinda bunch had begun addressing those needs

by translating the Bible, and doing so much more,

for some of those billions.

Lomalindians knew from experience

the meaning and implications of Platt’s words.

 

Now, looking back, I don’t hesitate to call them

spiritual giants,

choice saints.

But I didn’t recognize that in the beginning.

They were camouflaged as regular folks.

 

Saints. What are saints?

 

In the Bible, saints are described as God’s faithful servants, consecrated people, and those who worship Him (2 Samuel 2:9, Psalm 50:5).

 

Henri Nouwen describes saints as “people ‘set apart’ by God to be light in the darkness. . . . What makes them saints is their clear and unwavering focus on God and God’s people.”

 

Set apart, indeed.

 

And yet, Nouwen says, “Although we tend to think about saints as holy and pious, and picture them with halos above their heads and ecstatic gazes, true saints are . . . men and women like us, who live ordinary lives and struggle with ordinary problems. . . .”

 

“Most of their lives are remarkably similar to our own.” (Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey)

 

“Remarkably similar to our own,” he said. That’s what I meant when I wrote that Lomalinda’s people “were camouflaged as regular folks.” (From Chapter 10, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir)

 

God handed me countless blessings when He sent me to Lomalinda to work alongside choice saints.

 

He gave me a chance to sit around their dinner tables and to invite them to gather around our family’s table.

 

He gave me an opportunity to laugh with them, cry with them, pray with them.

 

In the commissary, I shopped alongside saints.

 

Some of Lomalinda’s saints worked as my kids’ teachers.

 

Saints piloted our fleet of small planes.

 

Saints staffed our clinic, our offices, and our childcare so moms could work during morning hours.

 

And then Henri Nouwen turns the focus away from the saints and instead forces us to look at ourselves: “The saints are our brothers and sisters, calling us to become like them.”

 

While I agree with Nouwen’s statement, I have a hunch genuine saints are not aware they’re calling us to become like them. Lomalinda’s people never even hinted that they were inviting me to be more like them.

 

After all, each of us—even a choice saint—is a recipient of God’s grace, His favor, His loving blessings we don’t deserve and can’t earn. Grace is a gift He gives us as we slog along on our daily journeys through ups and downs, failures and successes.

 

God was handing me one gift after another

and, among the finest, were and still are

His grace and His saints in Lomalinda.

 

And that was before I’d learned about Marxist guerrillas and kidnappings

What’s a comfortable—and cowardly—young suburbanite to do when her husband wants to move their young family to the middle of nowhere in South America?

I was that comfortable, cowardly, young suburbanite, and moving to the wilds of South America was the last way I wanted to live my life. At age twenty-six, I was in the early stages of chasing the American Dream.

Besides, adventure didn’t appeal to me—unless fixing up our recently purchased house could be called an adventure.

Let me tell you how I first got wind of my husband Dave’s outrageous idea:

One evening he had burst through the front door of our Seattle home and, with a boyish grin and outstretched arms, announced, “We’re moving to Lomalinda! I’m going to teach there!”

A few seconds passed before I could wheeze in enough air to speak. “Where is Lomalinda?”

“Colombia, South America!”

I collapsed to the floor.

I’d always expected we’d live a normal, predictable, all-American life but, without warning, my husband declared he had other ideas.

“We all like things to be predictable, don’t we?” writes author Steve Voake. “We expect things to . . . keep on happening just the way they always have. We expect the sun to rise in the morning. We expect to get up, survive the day and finish up in bed back at the end of it, ready to start it all over again the next day. . . . The fact of the matter is that nothing is ever certain. But most people never find that out until the ground suddenly disappears from beneath their feet.”

That described me: At Dave’s declaration, the ground began disappearing from beneath my feet.

As youth director for our church, Dave had taken college kids to a Wycliffe Bible Translators’ event hoping some would consider missions work. The meeting failed to persuade any of his young people but, when Dave learned Wycliffe needed teachers for their missionaries’ kids in Lomalinda, he was hooked. He wanted to move the four of us, including our preschoolers, Matt and Karen, to a dinky outpost in the middle of nowhere.

After a sleepless night, I hurried to the library and looked up Colombia’s people, geography, climate, wild critters—all strange to me.

Forty years later, I can still picture National Geographic’s close-up photo of a man. Everything about him appeared alien—his jungle surroundings, his face like dark leather, his hair coal-black.

He glared into the camera lens,

the whites of his eyes blood-red.

The thought of living in Colombia scared me out of my wits. And that was before I’d learned about Marxist guerrillas and kidnappings.

But, like Abraham, Dave had heard God’s voice, “Leave your homeland.”

My husband longed to hear me say, “Sure, let’s go!” But I didn’t like his idea. Not at all. The plans I’d made for my life and for my kids did not include living in Lomalinda. The thought of moving to a patch of grassland in South America made me choke. Uttering the word “yes” was unthinkable.

I understood Dave’s desire to serve God—I wanted to serve Him, too—but did he think real ministry happened only on the mission field? If so, he was mistaken. I said to him, a man with degrees in teaching and counseling, “You can minister by using your degrees in Seattle, you know.”

He gave me a blank stare, so I tried again. “God doesn’t need you in Lomalinda. He can find a dozen other teachers to fill that position.” But Dave had nothing to say, signaling he had made up his mind.

This was becoming a personal disaster for me, an emergency. I wished so much it was just a nightmare and that I’d soon wake up.

But I wasn’t sleeping. It was real life. And it had turned into a slippery chaos.

In coming days and weeks and months, Dave’s announcement and its implications would prove to be traumatic for me.

Even before I picked myself up off the floor,

I had begun praying, “Please, God, don’t make me go!”

(from Chapter 1, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir)

A pay cut, no medical insurance, no retirement plan

During my lifetime, the American Dream has been so pervasive in our values, assumptions, and expectations that we have allowed it to be a comfortable, acceptable, welcome part of Christianity.

The American dream: Upward mobility. Abundance. Living the good life.

Back in my twenties, those were my goals. I admit it. In my circles, including my church circles, that was the thing to do—that was the way we lived.

Like I said in “I was chasing the American Dream,” when I was a teenager and a young wife and mother, I never questioned those goals. I never questioned my motives for pursuing them.

What a shock it would have been for me if, back then, I had read David Wilkinson’s words in The Prayer of Jabez: “Do we really understand how far the American Dream is from God’s dream for us? We’re steeped in a culture that worships freedom, independence, personal rights, and the pursuit of pleasure.” 

Christianity and the American dream clash when our motives for getting more money and possessions are to show off our success, to impress others with our lifestyles, to use our status as a way to compete or exert power, or to pursue self-indulgence and self-gratification.

My husband, Dave, sensed I planned to pursue that kind of American dream, and I thank God for giving me a thinking, questioning man. Dave didn’t want that lifestyle for our young family.

This topic is not easily covered in one short blog post, but I’ll highlight Bible verses that spoke to my husband’s heart back in our pre-Lomalinda days (and later, spoke to my heart, and still do):

Jesus said: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is life not more than food, and the body more than clothes? . . . Do not worry, saying ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first His kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:25-33, NIV).

The New Living Translation words verse 33 this way: “Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.”

Eventually I realized I needed to look at the American dream in a new way, the better way. Dear Chuck Swindoll—my life and faith would be so different without him!—says, “If I am to seek first in my life God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness, then whatever else I do ought to relate to that goal . . . . Every decision I make ought to be filtered through the Matthew 6:33 filter: where I put my money, where and how I spend my time, what I buy, what I sell, what I give away.” (Dear Graduate: Letters of Wisdom from Charles R. Swindoll )

Here’s another of Jesus’ teachings: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. . . . No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:10-21, 24 NIV).

Or, the New Living Translation words verse 24 this way: “No one can serve two masters. . . . You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money.”

The New Century Version words verse 24 this way: “You cannot serve both God and worldly riches.”

Each person and family must decide how to apply those teachings of Jesus.

My husband and God eventually persuaded me to let go of chasing after that American dream.

Instead, our family took a big pay cut and moved to Lomalinda—no medical insurance, no retirement plan. We had to believe God would give us everything we needed—and He did! (And there’s a huge difference between what a person needs and wants.)

I recommend the following for more on this topic:

Priorities

The Christian Worldview and the American Dream

Should Christians Pursue the American Dream?

Haggai, Chapter 1, in the Old Testament (Caught Up With Taking Care of Our Own Houses) 

Should Christians Strive for the ‘American Dream’? 

I was chasing the American Dream

I’d always planned to chase the American Dream—I’d marry a guy who’d earn more money next year than this year. And more money each year after that. And we’d get a bigger, nicer house every so often. And increasingly nice furniture and carpets. New cars, too.

And I expected we’d continue our pursuit of happiness—which the Declaration of Independence says is our right. I assumed gaining more and better possessions would lead to that happiness.

Abundance. Upward mobility. Living the good life. When I was a kid and a young wife and mother, that’s what I assumed would be mine.

And I wasn’t alone. In The American Dream: A Cultural History, Lawrence R. Samuel observes that “. . . the American Dream . . . is thoroughly woven into the fabric of everyday life. It plays a vital, active role in who we are, what we do, and why we do it.”

I still remember the house my family moved into when I was about three years old. My dad had finished his duties in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II and, thanks to the GI Bill, my parents bought one of the many new houses popping up.

Our house was tiny, but it was new and in an all-new neighborhood in suburban Spokane, Washington. It had one bathroom (tub, no shower) and two bedrooms (smaller than many of today’s closets), one of which my two little brothers and I shared. The living room measured about thirteen feet long and nine feet wide. A small kitchen also served as our only place to eat. But life was good.

A few years later, my dad’s employer transferred him across the state to a tall office building in downtown Seattle. He and Mom were all a-twitter because he’d be wearing suits to work every day. Our family was moving up in the world.

We moved to Seattle’s far northern suburbs (now a city named Shoreline) and bought a house larger than our previous one. This one had three bedrooms—I no longer had to share one with my little brothers. Two bedrooms were tiny, but the master bedroom was a decent size, unlike the one in Spokane. We had one bathroom (tub, no shower), a small kitchen, and our eating space was off the kitchen in one corner of the living room. Yes, indeed, we had moved up in the world.

A year or so after our move, our thickly-forested neighborhood was deforested, and hundreds of new homes popped up—houses a bit bigger and nicer than ours. But my parents spruced ours up here and there as they could afford—they added a shower head to our bathtub (showers seemed to be a status symbol for families who had taken only baths for centuries) and, years later, built a dining room off the back of the house. Yep—we were moving up in the world.

Because of the American Dream, I assumed my husband, Dave, and I would start small and move to increasingly nicer houses. Indeed, we did start small—living in a pathetic little place as newlyweds, later moving to a new-ish apartment at Richmond Beach, Washington, and then into a two-bedroom house on a large wooded lot. 

In 1974, Dave and I bought a house in Edmonds, Washington, an attractive and comfortable town bordering our hometown of Shoreline. Our kids, Matt and Karen, each had their own bedrooms. Dave and I had a half-bath off our bedroom (which neither my parents nor Dave’s had) and in the hallway, we had a full bathroom with an impressive shower. Moving up, indeed.

And we had a fireplace—that was another notable amenity that my parents’ house didn’t have. And it gets better: We had a sliding glass door off of our dining nook. We had definitely moved up in the world.

But I did have dreams of replacing the turquoise rug one day—soon, I hoped. It was in good condition but didn’t match anything we owned.

And I hoped to spruce up the dark-stained kitchen cupboards.

And it would be nice if we could change the master half-bath into a full bath.

And I had dreams of making the kitchen and dining nook just a bit larger by adding on to the back of the house.

I figured this house would suit us well for years to come. I was really happy—until . . . .

Until that fateful February day in 1975 when:

My husband, Dave, burst through the front door of our home and, with a boyish grin and outstretched arms, announced, “We’re moving to Lomalinda! I’m going to teach there!”

 A few seconds passed before I could wheeze in enough air to speak. “Where is Lomalinda?”

 “Colombia, South America!”

 I collapsed to the floor.

 I’d always expected we’d live a normal, predictable, all-American life but, without warning, my husband declared he had other ideas. (from Chapter 1, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir) 

Any day now you should be able to buy Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir as an ebook, and it’s now available in paperback through your favorite independent bookseller, or the following:

Barnes and Noble (10% off with their promo code; 15% off for new customers)

Amazon

Powell’s Books

Eden.co.uk

Books-A-Million 

Indigo (Canada)