Reunion Pt. 2

Quickly, in the spirit I meant to adopt yesterday of telling stories from last week and not digressing with small preaching quips:

My first morning in Thailand, after our team of volunteers took toast and watermelon and migrated from the guesthouse where we stayed to the headquarters of OMF International's Southeastern Asian efforts, dubbed the "Mekong Center", I was introduced to the phenomenon whom I would be serving and with whom I would be working the next week at Reunion: the "TCK". I heard the term a few times before the mystery of its acronym was dispelled for me and grouped it with other impersonal abbreviations like "MIA", "FBI", and "KFC" until I learned whom it represented: "Third Culture Kids", who (picture here a red circle that partly overlaps a blue circle so that a purple area is made distinct from the red and blue), having been born to Western parents but raised in the East, felt not at home in either the East or West but were, while being conflicted in the tension between the red and blue cultures, mostly jumbled in the melting pot of these two cultures, the purple zone, if you will. Such is how the "TCK" was explained to me. A great sociological wonder that lived in the far reaches of ... and on and on.

As much as I teased the term, though, these were the teenagers I worked with and those I hope tomorrow night will go with me to take ice cream to the child beggars and flowers to the street prostitutes. Their parents, called from their family, friends, and home lands to follow Christ in the East, are "missionaries", in a very occupational sense of the word. The daily task of their parents is to show Christ's light in the darkness that is unreached Asia - they are paid for it, they are in a network of like-minded colleagues, and they have sons and daughters who without choosing were born into these occupational Christianity homes and quickly figured out they were foreigners in a strange land, both foreign by (usually) skin color and ideology. And why were they foreign and displaced? Because of the God of their parents, who also happens to be the God of mine, and the God of Abraham.

Perhaps you can then imagine the animosity and rebellion against God that so tempts these teenagers. That temptation is only greater when most of the students leave their homes at an early age, their parents wanting a better education for them than the schools in the villages or developing cities where they are stationed can offer. Most are sent to international boarding schools in a different country than their parents and siblings for nine months out of the year. But further, because of the nature of their parents' occupation, under contract by The Great Commission, the students tend to see Christianity as something "unreached people groups" need to hear, something that can help and inspire the poor and downtrodden, that is, relief for the weary village farmer - not for them, not for missionary kids who study in international boarding schools.

I was convicted then early in the week, as were Katrin and Tim, to reposition Christianity for these students, most of whom knew the stories and teachings of the Bible much better than my friends and me and if quizzed on memory verses would enter Final Jeopardy without have to risk a penny and still trump the other players by tenfold. They were brilliant students. Most of my small group, aged 16-19, had largely, even as recently as the past month, made sense of their upbringing in light of their own Christian faith. Thank God, truly - if God can speak out of Balaam's donkey, then He can use these kids to lead nations for him. Their younger brothers and sisters were going through a tougher time, but, confident in the stories that were related to me from the super cool YWAM students who led the other small groups, I think we helped them out a lot.

But I felt my high school students, even having made sense of their radical Christian upbringing, still saw Christianity in the same way that I saw Christianity for so many years of my life, as a religion that I could seamlessly integrate with secular success and worldly popularity. So I challenged them. Hard. The Gospels aren't ambiguous, nor do they say that only those who have a strange affinity for eating locusts and wild honey should sell all they have and give it to the poor, but that all those who seek treasure in heaven must do this and follow Christ. And to those who convert but still have ties to the world, Christ said, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God." It's not easy to live as a Christian, but by some sure trick of the devil we've made Christianity into a country club event on Sundays with refreshments before and after service. Coffee and cookies for all who believe!

And this, I don't believe, is what my generation of Christians wants - we aren't looking for an easy way of life or an easy Christianity. We don't want to just find a good job, a pretty spouse, and settle down somewhere to live comfortably. We want challenge, we want to be held to our commitments, we want to be presented with something difficult and strive to overcome all obstacles that bar our way. I really don't believe the Gospel that so appealed (so I'm told) to our parents' generation and their parents' generation, full of the "Believe and Be Saved!" message, is our Gospel. I think we side more (or would side more if it were ever what we heard from the country clubs on Sunday mornings!) with Luke 9: 57-62 and Luke 14: 25-34, and so these were the main passages with which I challenged my small group. "If anyone would come after me," Christ said, "he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me." (Luke 9:23) How much harder is that than taking an AP exam! Than earning six, seven figures a year! Than being baptized and joining a church. We've made Christianity too easy, and as a result have estranged brilliant students who need and want challenges that might just turn their lives upside down.

That was my commission for the week: to position Christianity so that if you were to live it as Christ lived it and meant for His followers to live it your world would be turned upside down. And the kids got it. They really did.

It was different, though. Tim and I are products of the polished and bright light Youth Quake craze: the mountaintop retreats with three to four hundred high school students, the blaring electric guitars and chorus of voices during worship times, the tears of the altar calls shed by repentant teenage heartthrobs. We knew to connect with these "TCK" (ehhh..) high school students we had to present something different, and after the first few sessions of super dull and unresponsive worship (worship that, no doubt, would have led three hundred American teenagers to the throne of God), we, by grace, got a bit better. No more fast and lyrically-shallow worship songs, no more ultra-happy Christianity, no more "You've just got to stop listening to heathen music and believe!" - the students needed a religion to inspire a purpose in their lives, something powerful and of Someone loyal, not to be told over and over again that sex, drugs, and rap music is bad, bad, bad.

That doesn't resolve, but I've to run quick to the boarding home of my good friend Sophie, who so graciously baked heartwarming brownies for the YWAM students and I two days ago, and see when we will next sit with the other boarding school students and their dorm 'auntie' and play this super silly German card game called "Bohnanza." You grow beans and sell them for gold coins. It's nuts, but the kids are a joy. Little elementary school Clara won last time, and I've to regain bean-growing glory.

Following that, the Mekong Center where I stay and from where I now write you will be hosting a pot-luck dinner this evening at 5:30 p.m. for the missionaries in town, followed by a prayer meeting from 6:30 to 8:00 in the prayer room on the far side of floor two, opposite from the room where I sleep, room number three. You're all invited!