Jesus, Compassion And JusticeSample

Re-evaluating Everything

So what does figuring out how to walk alongside people on the margins look like for a family like mine, coming from a place of privilege and affluence?

In the past, some missionaries have gone too far in exposing their families to danger and suffering, but today Christians may be guilty of the other extreme. In making our children into idols that need to be protected no matter what, we’ve lost sight of the central place God has for our kids in his purposes.

Nay and I have learned that as we trust God with our family, we will see him at work—not only in our neighborhood but also in the lives of our children. I’d like to ask you to consider that this is a calling not just for missionaries, but for every believer who calls themselves a follower of Christ.

The Israelites faced this same question of allegiance when they used the safety of their children as an excuse not to obey God and enter the Promised Land (Numbers 14:3). God called them out on their wrong priorities, and because of their disobedience they had to spend forty years in the wrong place.

The desert may have been “safer” than the war zone ahead of them, and maybe it had better schools, but it was clearly not where God had called them to go. Those children finally entered the Promised Land, but sadly without their parents.

You probably hear it all the time, even in church, this collective desire to move to a “better suburb” – often for “the sake of the kids”. And the phrase remains unquestioned and unchallenged, because it is the way we have always done things. Of course! Why wouldn’t a God-fearing family want to move to a “better suburb”? Upward-mobility is the unquestioned pathway in life for everyone. Right?

But what if the assumptions that underpin this drive to move up and out are not altogether healthy or Christ-like? What exactly do we mean when we say “better”? Allow me to pose a few questions that might help us deconstruct the meaning behind this phrase…

Is a better suburb one with less poor people or more people with our own skin color? Does anyone ever use the phrase moving to a “better” suburb to refer to an economically more impoverished neighborhood? What happens when a whole church becomes more and more disconnected from the struggles of the poor?

I remember the day I found Leanne shivering and homeless outside our church and she ended up staying with us for a while. I had to smile when, not long after she walked through our door, the kids climbed onto her lap and thrust a book into her weary face, “Can you read me a book Leanne?” You could almost see the healing taking place right before our eyes as Leanne was treated like a normal person for the first time in many years.

God used a ruddy shepherd boy named David—the youngest of all his brothers—to win a crucial battle and lead his people. God used a boy king named Josiah, who at age fifteen sought the God of David to launch a national revival. God led a young prophet named Jeremiah through danger, prison, suffering, and exile in the wilderness to bring messages to the people and to those in power. God used a poor, orphaned, foreign-born teenage girl named Esther to save the Jews.

Rather than coming as a member of the wealthy and powerful elite, God chose to announce his upside-down kingdom by being born as a vulnerable baby. Jesus placed children at the center of his reign when he said we must become like little children in order to enter the kingdom of God.

So let us not coddle and marginalize our children, assuming that God will wait to use them when they are adults. God wants to use your children now. Today. Here. This is the subversive way of Jesus!