Cross Cultural Kids

Ruth’s comments on this, by now, almost historical article based on her original research in 1986 of 282 adult missionary kids (AMKs), one sector of adult TCKs (ATCKs).

In 1984, I wrote the journaling that has now turned into Letters Never Sent (newly update with ‘the rest of the story’ thanks to Jo Parfitt and Summertime Publishing). It was through that process I came in touch with some of the previously unrecognized factors that had impacted my life. Some who read the manuscript assured me that while some of these things might have been my story, the world of missionary kids and other types of third culture kids had changed. Many sent me surveys taken among high school or college age TCKs to show me the things I had struggle with were no longer relevant.

 

I was willing to accept this, but one day I realized that if I had been answering any of these types of questions I had seen in the surveys while I was a teen or early twenty something, I would have basically answered “I’m just fine” and I believe I was…and in many ways I was. But it wasn’t until I moved on more into life and could not understand why with such a wonderful, almost ‘perfect’ life, I still struggled with patterns of depression, anxiety, and anger at various times. Searching for understanding is what led me to do the initial journaling and suddenly I wondered how other adult MKs were doing (I still didn’t understand the larger connection to other groups of TCKs). When Dave Pollock asked me to be a plenary speaker for the second International Conference on Missionary Kids to be held in Quito, Ecuador in January 1987, I decided I would find as many Adult MKs as I could and survey them to see how their longer term outcomes had also been. I will put the entire results of that survey on my website hopefully by summer, 2012, but in the meantime, this is an article I wrote for the Christian Association of Psychologists (CAPS) in 1988. (Only one attendee plus my sister chose this for their concurrent session of choice!) While it was written for a specific sector of TCKs, I believe it also shows the beginning strands of the universal themes that were emerging as well as the reality that while we as TCKs, and now as one type of CCKs, share many common themes, each group also has some specifics to understand about their own particular system. This was written in the beginning days of trying to understand the larger story and also it is a valid record of the progression of this wonderful and fascinating topic…the world of children who grow up among many cultural worlds.

 

One other piece of history before you read on: It was at the ICMK Quito where I first met Norma McCaig, founder of Global Nomads because she didn’t want to be called any sort of kid! She had grown up as a corporate child in India and Philippines but dared to attend the ICMK because she believed our sectors shared more than they differed in the basics of this story. She is the one who gave me the ultimate vision to even consider beginning something like Families in Global Transition (FIGT) as a cross-sector conference and it was another great and personal loss for me when she died in 2006 and her beginning influence is present even in this early writing. Here is a picture of Norma when we honored her at the FIGT conference a few months before her death.

The Paradox of Pain and Faith
(Previously “Possible Results of Repeated Cycles of Separation and Loss During Childhood on Adult Missionary Kids (AMKS)”)

Written December, 1988 for CAPS conference by Ruth E. Van Reken

SUMMARY

In 1986, I surveyed 282 Adult Missionary Kids (AMKs) on the amounts and types of separations they had experienced from family, friends, relatives, and country during their first eighteen years of life. At the time of the survey, these adults who had grown up as children of missionaries in various countries around the world were all between the ages of twenty-two and seventy-five.

In spite of many differences in types and amounts of separation those born prior to 1946 experienced compared to those born in 1946 or later, the response of those who said the frequent separations had a primarily negative effect for them was virtually the same in both groups–40% in the older group of AMKs, 39% in the younger group.

This paper attempts to look at the overall picture of a missionary kid’s general lifestyle, the types of separations incurred, and the missionary subculture itself so counselors and therapists can better understand the issues their AMK clients may be facing.

What’s the Difference Between an MK, AMK, TCK, and ATCK?

An MKis the common abbreviation for “missionary kid,” one whose parents are missionaries of one sort or another. Generally MKs spend many of their formative years outside their parents’ home culture, as well as home country. An AMKis simply an adult who grew up as an MK.

TCK–or Third Culture Kid–is the term commonly used for all children growing up outside their parents’ home culture. They include children of international business people, diplomatic corps, military families, as well as missionaries. An ATCK is an adult third culture kid–one who grew up as a TCK.

The term “Third Culture Kid” was coined in the early 1960′s by a sociologist from Michigan State University, Dr. Ruth Hill Useem. She found that her American students raised in countries outside the United States were distinctively different from her American students born and raised in the USA. In some ways these foreign raised students appeared more mature than those who had never left the country. For example, they exhibited greater ease in relationships with adults. In other ways, however, these same students seemed immature. Dating and social skills were lacking. To better understand the reasons for the differences she saw, Dr. Useem visited sixteen countries to study American expatriate communities living overseas. There she discovered that each of these communities had developed a subculture. It was one rooted in the home (or first) cultureand being lived out in the host (or second) culture. In the end, however, it was neither one. It had become its own culture–one common to the members who were living in it, but different from either the home or host culture. She called this expatriate culture the third cultureand the children who were being raised in it third culture kids.

While Dr. Useem was making these discoveries on the academic front, Dave Pollock went as a missionary to Kenya in the early 1970′s and worked near Rift Valley Academy. He, too, noticed recurring characteristics among most of the expatriate students he met from that school. There were very definite strengths they seemed to share as well as common struggles. Dave returned to America and co-founded Interaction, Inc.–an organization aimed at helping churches, missions, and other international organizations better care for their families. Dave used Dr. Useem’s term, “Third Culture Kid,” but in a broader way. No longer did it mean the specific culture of one particular expatriate community in a given locality, but it became a more generic term to refer to the common experiences generally shared by all who have been raised in a culture outside their parental culture. Missionary kids, or MKs, make up one subset of that larger Third Culture Kid world.

Experiences Common to All TCKs

Before looking at the specific issues that impact MKs and AMKs, it is important to have a general overview of TCKs and what they share in common regardless of which organization sponsored their parents.

TCKs are not a breed apart. Their experiences have differed from those raised exclusively in one country or culture–not their humanity. Because each of them has been created in the image of God along with all other human beings, they have the same needs for closeness, understanding, love, places to express creativity, to think, to wonder, and to make choices as anyone else. When those needs are met, they live rich, full, healthy lives. On the other hand, when, for whatever reasons, these basic needs are unmet, TCKs do what others do. They seek ways to meet those needs while trying to avoid emotional pain.

There are two major factors which are true in virtually every TCK’s life. The first is that it is a life filled with cultural diversity. The second is that it is a life of high mobility.

Issues Related to Cross-Cultural Upbringing

The first reality TCKs share is that they have been reared among and in more than one culture. This has great benefits. Learning that there is more than one way of doing things, acquiring linguistic skills, being a bridge of communication between people of various cultures, and gaining a large world view are all some of the great, great strengths and joys from this background.

But this gift of cultural diversity also carries some hidden challenges. When a child grows up where one set of rules is in operation (for many TCKs it may be the rules of their subset expatriate subculture as well as the rules operative in the host culture), and suddenly that child moves where completely different cultural rules are in place, there can be an incredible sense of internal dissonance. Children who have felt secure, loved, protected, knowledgeable, and known exactly where they fit in one setting suddenly find themselves odd people out. They are the only ones who don’t get the jokes, or know how to drive somewhere. They don’t understand the local culture’s rules of dressing and continually find themselves inappropriately attired for any particular occasion no matter how hard they try.

Since it is the task of childhood to absorb the cultural practices of the surrounding community and then internalize those rules and practices during adolescence, when TCKs change worlds as teenagers, they are suddenly faced with learning completely new cultural rules while their peers are comfortably internalizing the ones they already know. TCKs often find themselves completely out of phase developmentally with their peers ion their new world.

This is particularly difficult when TCKs return to their supposedly “home” culture at this critical time and look like those around them. The presumption is they will automatically know the rules as others do. All of this can lead to a great sense of insecurity as well as an identity crisis.

In Africa I knew I wasn’t African and I thought it was because I was American. Now, I’m in America and I found out I’m not really like the Americans either. Who am I? they wonder.

TCKs who never had help with reentering their home cultures or in understanding the dynamics of their lifestyle and the role cultural balance plays in everyone’s life, may conclude that something is intrinsically wrong with them because they never seem to fit in anywhere. Ultimately, the TCK may take on a permanent identity of “being different.” The problem with that, however, is that in their very efforts to prove they don’t care what others think, TCKs can ultimately feel alienated and alone. No matter what any of us tells ourselves consciously about not needing others, some deep place within each of us yearns for a place of belonging, a place where we can fit and be understood.

The issues that arise out of the confusion of living among many cultures before a child’s own internal sense of identity has been firmly established come out in various forms. There can be a chronic feeling that home is somewhere else. A chameleon-like personality may seem to develop–one that adapts to whatever surrounding the TCK is in, but no one knows exactly who is underneath. A deep sense of inferiority–”Something dreadful is the matter with me.”

Issues Related to High Mobility

Some ask how we can say that basically all TCKs experience a life of high mobility. Some TCKs live on one mission station or in the host city their entire lives.

Even if the TCKs themselves aren’t constantly moving, someone in their lives is always coming or going. It may be a short-termer, the relatives left in the home country, a best friend whose parents were recently transferred, or leaving their national caretaker during furlough periods.

There are many benefits to mobility–flexibility, a 3-D view of the world, and independence, to name a few–but this mobility leads to a chronic cycle of separation and loss. As psychologist, Dr. Frances White writes–in this case specifically about the missionary community, but it applies to all TCK communities, “Separation is a universal phenomenon . . . (but) missionaries, because of the nature of their work, are particularly vulnerable to separations. They experience not only the normal developmental phases that entail separations and the usual share of situational separations faced by the world at large, but also a number of partings idiosyncratic to their profession.

Although the losses are many, I believe the main problem for TCKs is not the losses in and of themselves. All people have loss in their lives. For the TCK, however, many of the losses are often hidden–even to themselves. This means the resulting grief is often not dealt with appropriately.

When any magazine article discusses how to deal with grief, situations mentioned may include death, divorce, or terminal illness, but never have I seen the fact that TCKs can lose their whole world with the closing of an airplane door cited as an example of why they might grieve. For TCKs, however, that can be one of the most profound moments of grief in their entire life. Every pet, every friend, every tree they climbed, every secret place they hid, every sense of home they have known, are all gone with one airplane ride–but there is no funeral, no formal closure. For many, it is an irretrievable loss. They will never come back. If they do, that world is so changed, it is still not the same.

High mobility can also cause hidden losses within the normal family structure for a TCK. Because of schooling needs, some siblings may be off in boarding school or back in their home countries while younger siblings remain with the parents in the host country. Siblings who go off to boarding school together often are not allowed to room together, even when they are the same gender. For those AMKs who spent twelve of their first eighteen years in boarding schools, or were separated for four year stretches at a time in high school years as used to be the normal practice, there is often a lack of strong parenting or family role models. They simply haven’t lived in a single family unit for most of their developmental years.

A deep sense of rootlessness is another result of high mobility. For many TCKs, this is also a deep, although hidden loss. Where do I belong? Here? There? Anywhere?An almost diagnostic question for being a TCK is “Where are you from?” If the responder has to think, or asks back, “At what time in my life do you mean?” or some similar response, it is very likely this person has had some form of a TCK background.

The unresolved grief for any of these hidden losses results in behavior similar to people who have unresolved grief for other reasons. TCKs can exhibit anger, defensiveness, depression, withdrawal, or an outwardly outgoing persona, but a place deep inside where no one will ever be trusted. The inner presumption is that no one ever stays forever so don’t let others into that deepest place or the pain will be unbearable when they leave.

When the depression, or anger, or paralyzing perfectionism, finally results in TCKs seeking help, their counselors often don’t understand some of the underlying reasons for the behavior. Issues such as the difficulties of the current situation, good and bad parental patterns, or whatever, may be addressed while the core issues behind the grief go unrecognized.

This is not to blame therapists or counselors. If they have not lived a TCK lifestyle, there is no way for them to know about these losses unless the TCK, or someone else, identifies them. Unfortunately, for many ATCKs, as it was for me, the very goodness of our upbringing hides the grief and even we can’t explain it. I grew up in Nigeria and I loved it. My parents were teachers and I had countless friends to play with from their school. I loved market with all its sights, smells, hustle and bustle as well as the fun of bargaining. There were wonderful trees to climb and use for hide and seek. The whole ambiance of Africa is something I can never fully describe, but when I’m there I soak in the wonder of how much I love that world in the deepest places of my soul.

I also loved our traveling. What other thirteen-year-old did I know in Chicago who had already seen not only Africa but Italy, Holland, Switzerland, France, Belgium and England? Who else had enjoyed the wondrous feasts prepared for each meal on an ocean liner? And I’d already done it three times. Friends of mine had never been in an airplane while I’d lost count of how many rides I’d taken. I had a wonderful, supportive, close family. Looking at my story gave me no “right” to struggle with depression. Thus, when I began to experience profound depression in my mid-twenties, I knew it could only be my current circumstances. What else could it be from? My husband was an intern, often on every other night call. I had a new baby and was living in a city where I didn’t know one person before I’d moved there. Surely those were enough reasons to be depressed.

It was only years later, when I was thirty-nine and had continued to struggle at other times with depression in completely different circumstances, that I had to face the fact there must be some unknown issue within me causing this depression. The outward events continued to change, but the internal reactions remained the same. What could it be?

That was when I began a journal that eventually became Letters Never Sent and I realized there were some profound grief issues resulting from the many losses that were part of my life, even among the many blessings. I had separated from my family to attend boarding school at age six, stayed in America for four years of high school while my parents returned to Africa, and lost the whole world of Africa I loved so much when I was thirteen. At thirty-nine I finally mourned for the losses I’d never truly acknowledged before and was able to find comfort for my unrecognized griefs in ways that were deeply healing.

Specific Issues Relating to Adult Missionary Kids

While the above issues affect TCKs of every background, there are some very specific issues of which those counseling AMKs must also be aware. These factors arise from a third overlay on the lives of TCKs who are also MKs. It is the overlay of faith–the questions that arise from dealing with the paradox of faith and pain in the same situations.

As I said earlier, the issues of unrecognized and unresolved grief arising from mobility and multicultural issues are common to all TCKs. For AMKs, however, the reasons for most of their losses are directly tied to God. Who asked their parents to be missionaries in the first place? Pain issues, therefore, are intricately related to faith issues. To question the pain is to question God.

Particularly for older AMKs, among the rules of the missionary subculture of the early days was the idea of “being a good soldier for Jesus.” Acknowledging pain (outside of someone dying) was seen as spiritual weakness. Families who left missions “for their kids” were talked about in hushed whispers. “Isn’t that too bad? Their kids just couldn’t make it.” I know that one of the driving forces for me to be successful in high school in Chicago was so my parents would not have to return from Africa for me. The shame of being that much of a failure was more than I was willing to bear and kept me in denial that I missed them at all. For some AMKs who want to keep their faith, it is virtually impossible to look at any pain in their experience because it would be a negation of God and their acceptance of His will for them or their parents.

Perhaps because of this message that pain and faith cannot mix, AMKs may have learned as children to deny their true feelings. They began to voice a message that worked with their missionary subculture. “I miss my parents a little when we say goodbye, but I don’t really mind because I know they are serving Jesus.” Also, they knew, as I did, that they were loved by their parents, they themselves loved God, there were so many fun things like jumping rope, playing jacks, Red Rover, and tag after school each day, to complain about homesickness seemed very petty.

Besides trying to find approval in the missionary subculture by being good soldiers, (at least I know I certainly did), AMKs eventually go through so many cycles of separation and loss, they set up the normal human defense of denial and detachment. To quote from some respondents of my survey, “In my younger years, say pre-sixth grade, I would weep for not having my parents with me as the loss felt like a death and I was incapable–helpless–to change things to get them back.” “The first few years I would miss my parents desperately for days to weeks. Eventually I became numbed/inured–no missing at all–out of sight, out of mind.”

This denial of pain from the separations is another important issue for counselors to keep in mind. The ironic thing is that if AMKs truly felt no pain when leaving their parents at age six (or whenever), then there is a far greater question of “Why not?” To grieve at separations from those we love is completely normal–and healthy.

For those of us who denied our pain, that denial can remain in place into early adulthood. Life still feels controllable and AMKs are hopeful that whatever small problems there are in their lives will be resolved with age. Often the first crisis comes when AMKs marry and are not the perfect husband or wife they expected to be. Or it may be when the first baby comes and the overwhelming love they feel for that child ends up in the question, “If this is how my parents felt about me, how could they ever have sent me away?”–leading to the hurtful, and angry, conclusion that their parents couldn’t have loved them so much after all. Unfortunately, the anger and frustration stay focused on the specifics of the situation–”If my husband would only change, I wouldn’t be like this.” “If my parents spent more time with their grandkids, everything would be fine.”

It is at the point when the hidden pain finally surfaces that AMKs who at least subconsciously believe the “faith vs. pain” model are left with a painful choice. Do they once again deny and stuff the pain back inside, or do they now reject the faith and the whole system which seem to have caused so much pain? How could a loving God require the price of family separations? How could their parents have considered such a thing? How could a mission board have been so insensitive?

Family and friends watch this process with dismay. They see the bitterness and rage growing in the AMK and are impacted deeply as the AMK now wants to withdraw in hurt and rage. In their efforts to be helpful, these well-meaning friends and family admonish the AMK that to forget the past, trust Jesus more, and go on. But how can AMKs trust the One who, from their perspective, caused the pain? This is what one AMK wrote:
I suspect that I am not typical for an MK, but I also suspect there are a number of others like me, and all of us perhaps a little ashamed to admit how difficult some parts of our life have been for us. Somehow, being an MK was supposed to be “special.” But it never worked for me.
I think that if someone had been open with me–able to accept my questions about why I felt so rotten if God wanted my parents to do what they did, instead of speaking platitudes about God taking care of everything if you trust Him, I might have found an easier way through those years. Instead, I ended up feeling I’d been conned, fed a line that was an easy way out for the adults around me. I suspect I had questions that they couldn’t really answer. So easy–my pain was a consequence of my failure to trust in God–but I didn’t know how to trust any more that I was and the pain didn’t go away. So the second lesson I learned was you couldn’t count on God either. That is a very lonely and scary place to be–not able to trust people or to trust God.

This is what has happened to countless AMKs. When no one helps them see what is behind their pain and too quickly rushes to spiritualize it, the AMKs finally feel they have no recourse but to leave family, friends, the mission system, even God and look somewhere–anywhere–else to find something to ease the pain.

Other AMKs face this first crisis and build further denials on the first ones. They may return to missions and send their own six year olds proudly off to boarding school–loudly proclaiming to all around that “It never bothered me and it doesn’t bother Susie. She loves it as much as I did.” The problem is that the anger and hurt that is still hidden within come out in difficult relationships with those in authority, other missionaries, and the citizens of their host country as well.

Another response I often hear is, “Well, these may have been issues in the past, but things are different now. We don’t have as much separation as before.”

This is true. Things have changed dramatically in amounts and types of separation MKs have experienced between former years and the present. The number of AMKs who had lost a parent or sibling to death was significantly higher in the pre-1946 AMKs than the younger group. Twenty-four per cent of the older AMKS had lost a family member to death compared to 7% of the younger group. 9% of the older AMKs had been separated from their parents for a significant amount of time in their first six years of life. (Some MKs were left for up to four years at a time in group homes or with relatives at early ages during the war years when children were not allowed on ships because of the danger of them being attacked at sea. My parents went to Africa while my mother was pregnant with her first child so they would not have to leave my sister behind, or stay behind themselves. The ship they traveled on was, in fact, sunk by enemy fire on its return voyage.) Only 2% of the younger group said they had been separated during those years.

One question on the survey asked, “What was the longest period of time you went without seeing your parents even once during your first eighteen years of life?” For older AMKs, that answer was 3.6 years. For the younger group, it was eleven months. Not even one AMK born after 1956 had gone one year without seeing his or her parents. With far more schools available in the countries of service, with travel easier than during the years when people went overseas primarily by freighters, and with new awareness of family needs, there undoubtedly are major changes in how separations occur.

But that begs a deeper point. For those who experienced the excessively long separations, or all twelve school age years apart from home, or the impact of the war years on their experiences, and have never dealt with the impact of those losses, the results of those experiences are still being felt and need to be dealt with. To say because things have changed means there are no issues is to hurt these older AMKs twice. First, they were hurt by whatever grief they went through. Second, they are hurt when their pain is not validated. One friend of mine was in concentration camp for four years after her boarding school was taken captive. When her mission sent out a survey to AMKs, none of the AMKs of her group was included because the mission reasoned, “Your experiences were so different, they wouldn’t count in our survey. It would make the results too skewed.” For her, the message was that, if it had been a difficult experience, no one wanted to know about it because her pain might make things too messy.

However, there is an even more compelling point to make when people say because the current separation patterns are so different from the past that none of what I’ve discussed applies. From my survey of AMKs, it appears the specific length of time or reason for the separation is not the only factor which determines whether or not it has a strong impact on the MK.

In spite of the vast differences in the patterns of separation, the per cent of those who responded saying the separations had an essentially negative impact on their lives was virtually the same in both groups–40% in the older AMKS, 39% in the younger. This did not include any who had what I called a “Both/and” response such as, “Well, it took a lot of years for me to trust someone to be my friend, but now I realize it also makes me more sympathetic to those who are lonely.”

I was surprised to see the effects of separation were so similar when the patterns of separation between the age groups had been so different. As I pondered on the possible reasons for that, I concluded that the actual length of time for separations may not ultimately be as significant as the number of cycles or times separations take place. While I did not see my parents once during my four years in high school, I was in a very stable situation. I lived with my grandmother and aunt, stayed in the same church with the same friends all four years, and for the first in my life time was not chronically saying goodbye to everyone. I’d said a major goodbye to my family, it had been extremely painful, but it only happened once. After that, it became something similar to a death experience. The missing was there at times, but the option to change things seemed nonexistent, so reality was accepted and life moved on in the present with no great interruptions.

In today’s MK world, many go home from boarding school every three months for one month. While it is most commendable for children to see their parents more often, and ultimately healthier I believe or at least presume, still every time children go home, they know another leaving is only a few weeks away. This can lead to an unrealistic family life as parents may tend to make this reunion time more like a chronic vacation. Families don’t want to deal with painful or conflictual matters because no one wants to rock the boat when separation is so close again. The pain of the farewell, the pulling away from each other many families do just before the leaving, etc., are experienced so repetitively that the cycle itself becomes destructive. The MKs begin to live with a chronic inner guard around their feelings, always knowing another leaving is just around the corner. It is wiser not to become too emotionally invested in a current situation than to risk deep attachment.

What’s the Answer?

For healing of past grief, or better processing of current grief, it’s essential to face the pain, mourn the loss, forgive when that is needed, ask forgiveness what that is required, be comforted and then, as with grief for any reasons, move through it and on to the next part of life. Once counselors recognize the reasons for the unresolved grief of AMKs, they are well equipped to help them as they would be for any other clients.

For the specific pain vs. faith conflict, however, I believe there is one deeper step to go–and it is an essential one to optimally help AMKs. That is to have a look at a basic theology of grief. Do we have permission from God to have it, or is it unspiritual? Can God’s will still be painful? Does He ever ask parents and children to separate? We tend to live in a world that seems to say God would never ask us to suffer, that if it doesn’t feel good, don’t do it. The pendulum seems to have swung from parents separating at any cost to parents refusing to separate for even the slightest cost. Which view is correct? How do we put it all together? How can we help each other?

Since I am one who always denied my pain and clung tenaciously to my faith as almost a banner to prove I had no “problems,” (and somehow my depressions didn’t count) let me share the relatively simple answer with which God has satisfied my heart. Based on looking at the life of Jesus, we must learn to live with the incredible, almost paradoxical fact, that pain and faith are not mutually exclusive but can live in their greatest expression in the very same person and moment simultaneously.

This realization came to me one day in Liberia when my uncle had been in a motorcycle accident. He lay dying in one room of the hospital while I was with my cousin, who had also been badly injured, in another room. I had no idea how to pray. If I prayed for his recovery, would he ever walk or see again? Would it be my fault if he died since I didn’t have faith enough to believe he could ever be completely well? And so the confusion raged.

In the midst of that, I had an experience unlike any I’ve had before or since. Christ somehow took me with Him to the Garden of Gethsemane where I saw him doubled over in deepest agony. Then He said to me, “Ruth, I know what it is not to want the Father’s will. Sometimes it is very hard. Because of that, I’m not going to push you through this, I’m going to carry you.” In the time of Christ’s greatest act of faith, He endured the deepest pain ever possible. But the “nevertheless,” the ultimate acceptance of moving on to do the Father’s will, could only come after He wrestled with that pain, not after He denied it.

That single understanding–to see the incredible paradox that I am able to wish the Father’s will could be, or could have been different right in the middle of obedience to that will–gave me the freedom to begin my journey back to sort out the pain issues I had denied for so long. I no longer had to decide if my parent’s had been right or wrong, if the mission was a terrible system, if God had failed me because it had been hard to leave them. I no longer had to deny my pain so I could prove my parents were 100% correct in the decisions they made seeking to follow God’s leading for them and our family.

A few years after the experience with Christ in the Garden, I spoke at a conference on MKs. I shared this story and how Christ had given me permission to have pain. The next day one speaker extolled all the positives about being an MK. The problem was, I agreed with all these positives and soon I was crying, feeling again like the child who was wrong because she wasn’t being brave enough. I ran to my room as soon as I could and cried out to God, “What’s the truth? You said I could deal with my pain, but everything he said today was true. With all that wonderful stuff going for me, how could I have possibly had pain?”

However Jesus answers in moments like that, I knew He said to me, “Ruth, faith and pain, even joy and pain, aren’t mutually exclusive. You don’t have to choose one or the other. You can live in perfect faith and deepest pain all at the same time. I’m not the One who told you they couldn’t exist together.”

That led me to a study of the Gospels to see how Christ did deal with His own pain outside of the moment in the Garden. Over and over, he expressed it. “My soul is in despair unto death, but will I ask for this to be taken away from Me?” Yet when the pain got worse, He did ask for it to be removed. Then, after yielding in the Garden, the pain became literally unbearable on the cross and His first words were, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” Until Jesus worked through His pain of feeling utterly abandoned by His Father, He could not say, “Forgive them for they know not what they do,” or make provisions for His mother to be cared for. But after facing the pain, both in the Garden and on the Cross, Jesus was able to go ahead and do God’s will.

I realized there are other Scriptural paradoxes I can also live with. In Timothy, we are told that a man who does not care for his own household is worse than an infidel. Yet, in the Gospels, Jesus says one who does not leave family is not worthy to be His disciple. How does that all go together? I can’t say, but I believe that the one who understands, cares about my own pain and has comforted me so deeply, is also the Shepherd who cares for my family. In raising my own three MKs, I had to believe that as I followed a step and situation at a time, He would lead us in the specific decisions that were ultimately best for them while allowing us to be part of the greater story of what He is doing in this world. There is no one or two step formula nor any “One size fits all” plan.

Perhaps the most amazing thing of all to me is that as I went back and allowed Christ to show me the places of struggle and deal with my pain, I became infinitely freer to also affirm–and use–all the strengths and wonderful gifts of my past. To acknowledge the gifts does not negate the pain. To acknowledge the pain does not negate the gifts.

I believe once AMKs are free to look at the past without the fear that they will have to reject their parents, faith, or personal heritage if they come across a painful part, then true healing can start. Conversely, other AMKs who have concentrated on their pain exclusively may need to see that they will not have to deny their pain to look at the wonderful gifts they have also been given in their life story as MKs. The permission to do both comes from Christ Himself.

Also, the more we learn about the hidden issues that cause pain in TCKs’ lives–and some pain was unnecessarily caused by lack of proper closure, premature reassignments, bad timing in furloughs as regarded schooling patterns, wrong people assigned to jobs as boarding parents–the more we can do to either prevent the situations, or deal with the loss issues as they are occurring instead of decades later.

Yes, Jesus is the Redeemer. Somehow He takes all our joys, our sorrows, our brokenness, our gifts, and makes them into a whole from which good springs forth. I know God’s time for healing of wounded AMKs has come. May you who work with TCKs, MKs, Adult TCKs, and Adult MKs, be instruments of redemption in their lives. And may walking with them bring redemption and joy to your lives as well.