Sons of God's Generals: Unlocking the Power of Godly Inheritance (4 page)

When I say Chihango was outside the city of Maputo, I mean it was an hour away down some of the worst dirt roads I’ve been on. I’ll just say those early rides to school didn’t lend themselves to sleeping. At one point on the journey from the city to the center, our trucks had to pass through a stretch of road adjacent to a sandy cliff that barely allowed for the width of the truck. I wondered repeatedly if it would one day drop into the ocean.

Many people ask me about my education growing up, often assuming I was homeschooled, which, once you get to know my parents and their schedule, is slightly comical. I think it’s a testament to God’s goodness, knowing how much they value education, that not long after we arrived they were contacted by a couple of teachers who had taught at my dad’s boarding school in Taiwan, and asked if there was a need for an American missionary school in Maputo. It was a strict school with high workload standards and a focus on college prep. The students I knew who wanted to attend university in the United States performed satisfactorily on their SATs and were well prepared.

Before the Christian Academy of Mozambique was officially founded, however, Elisha and I attended a South African school for a semester. We had an eventful first day before we even made it to the school. It was close by, and the quickest way to get there was to walk through a local market, the type of place where you buy a live, squawking chicken for dinner. My mother, brother, and I left the house and were about to enter the market when a Mozambican woman came running to stop us in our tracks and urge us to turn around. My mom had befriended women in the market while learning Portuguese, and one recognized us. Riots had broken out, and we would have walked straight into them and more than likely been beaten and robbed, because at the time there were very few foreigners in the city and crime rates were high. Thankfully our new friend warned us away. Suffice to say we got to school via another route, and aside from a watch-stealing incident, walks became less eventful.

My first Mozambican friends lived on the street where we rented our first house in Maputo. They would come to our courtyard to play and taught me my first Portuguese words while they attempted some English ones. They brought clams from the nearby ocean, smashed them open in front of me and ate them from the shell, insisting I do the same. When we moved out to Chihango I had my first experience with more rural village kids who would surround me and stroke my blonde hair and touch my skin. It was overwhelming at first, but pretty soon I wasn’t as much of a novelty. I befriended some of the girls at our center and learned you can play quite a few games without fully speaking someone’s language. One day we were all at my house while my parents were gone and I wanted to pierce my ears like them, so they gathered around with needles and Vaseline and we all started praying that it would go well. But I kept jumping back from the needle. When my mom came home and heard, she made sure I had my ears pierced in a more sterile South African environment within weeks.

One of our first missionaries there was a kind but gruff-looking man missing his front teeth whom we nicknamed Machete Bill. I feel he deserves an honorable mention. He was an incredibly loyal man who met my parents in Asia, and after they took a faith journey into a Malaysian prison in Penang and witnessed to his stepson, he vowed to join them in Africa and serve their vision. He was an ex-military man who scared away some thieves that visited him in the night at our center, first by acting insane and running around the room flailing his limbs, and later by decorating a coconut with a face and stabbing it with a knife. My parents had to ask that he refrain from going on land mine searches in our trucks filled with kids along for the ride. He built himself a cage around his bed to ward off the bats and got his nickname from being frequently sighted in a field during the day sharpening his machete.

I learned cross-cultural communication from a lot of people, but perhaps best from my Brazilian friend Sarah Braga. Brazilian missionary families absolutely played a huge role in my upbringing. If it takes a village to raise a child, then they were my village and I am ever thankful for them. I began staying with Sarah when my parents traveled, so we tried to come up with things to do while stumbling through learning each other’s language, things that included creating obstacle courses or finding frogs. She felt like my partner in everything growing up, and when my parents began traveling more, her family absolutely became my second family. I was constantly immersed in Brazilian culture, almost as much as Mozambican culture, because they all tend to congregate together. They do community really well, perhaps more so than any other culture I know, and Brazil sends out missionaries to every Portuguese-speaking country in the world. Sarah and my other Brazilian friends were around for so many good and bad moments growing up, too many to mention here. She’s taught me so much about vulnerability, loving the Lord, and being an honest and loyal friend.

When we started another children’s center outside the city in Zimpeto, our home for the majority of my years in Mozambique, every Wednesday night my mom would go do street outreach in Maputo and inevitably bring home kids to live at our center. They would shower at our house and generally my brother or I would give away some of our clothes. Once we had a boy newly brought in from the street in our living room, a boy who owned literally nothing. Mom asked if I had anything I’d like to give away, so I went into my room, and after some deliberation I brought back my big stuffed Pumbaa from Disneyland, the same one I tried not to envision while eating warthog. Elisha and I learned from my parents to give things away easily and know we’d be provided for, so much so that once he was down to his last shirt before he finally made a comment. Zimpeto was home to water gun wars with kids and late-night basketball games, and I’m pretty sure I’ve attempted to climb every tree on the expansive property.

After working on logistics for months, my dad was able to get our first miracle Cessna plane into the country, a plane that endured years of bush outreach trips. We would take family trips to South Africa for supplies, the land of hot water, cheese, and air-conditioning, during which he taught me to help fly. He let me pull back for takeoff, read some of the instruments, and take over for a while, but I have yet to land a plane. Unfortunately, more than one person has been made sick by my zero-gravity practice maneuvers during which my dad would float pens in the air. It’s still a goal of mine to get a pilot’s license one day. Looking back, it’s a bit surreal that I got to fly a Cessna airplane to my braces appointments.

When people ask me what it was like, I assume some want to know what it was like to have parents constantly pulled on by masses of people who rely on them. Probably our biggest struggle as a family was the need for more alone time. I had loving parents who led busy lives and assumed responsibility for a lot of people. They were in high-intensity situations all the time, having never really been through inner healing, so they had to learn, sometimes clumsily, to navigate all that in their relationship and in our family relationships. I did notice something changed about them, although I can’t say exactly what, after they came back from a trip to Toronto. It was clearly a good thing, but suddenly my mom became a sought-after speaker and began traveling more. It was a struggle sometimes, and one we’ve had to process through together.

I actually didn’t fully realize the busyness was too extreme until years later when friends started helping me process it, and my mom started telling me they had made some mistakes with their time and she needed to ask for forgiveness. It was a revelation that, shockingly enough, I actually did need healing to break off some of the insecurities that stemmed from that time.

I don’t believe spending too much time apart from family is at all a necessary side effect of missions, or even that in the name of sacrificing for the poor you should think that it’s normal. I don’t even think it has to be normal to feel stressed by a stressful environment or demanding situations. It’s possible and clearly preferable to feel balanced and at rest in God in the midst of a storm. I think I have amazing parents who simply didn’t have certain relational skill sets until later in life, including setting up healthy boundaries and slowing down to work through painful moments instead of trying to maintain normalcy through busyness.

Most families I know need healing in certain areas from generational and personal struggles. In our case I think those were magnified and intensified sometimes by the high-expectation environment that we were in all the time. I love my parents, I’m grateful for them, and I’m grateful we have the continued opportunity to grow into healthier, more relationally connected people. It’s been an ongoing healing journey for all of us, I think, and a chance to celebrate the redemption of God.

I feel the need to point out we did have typical family dinners and movie nights that often involved my dad powering up a generator, because electricity was so sporadic. For fun, besides South African getaways, we loved Kruger Park, tennis, and beach days to name a few. My mother is among the most loving and generous individuals on the planet. She is generous in every way, both in resources and in the way she constantly gives of herself and shares her heart with the world and with the individual. She’s admitted to using busyness in work and ministry as an excuse to run away sometimes, and now encourages us to embrace healing and become the healthiest versions of ourselves.

My father is a wise man who could have taught at universities or maintained a comfortable job, but with my mom has pursued the living gospel around the world. He’s actually rather quiet and understated, enjoying long conversations over a table with family or close friends, dialoging an issue for the sake of engaging the mind and considering the other side. Sometimes it’s infuriating. Not unlike other men in the family, he can be a perfectionist and isn’t always verbally expressive, although he has let me know I’m perfect—an obvious lie. As you can imagine, the Holy Spirit and a near-death experience have had a huge impact on his life and made him a freer person. I have no doubt he’d do anything for us. He’s never held money tightly, and when he hears Mom’s given away something outrageous, he pretends to act surprised for a second and then joins in for the faith ride of continued provision.

Maybe if I had grown up in the west and grown up again in Mozambique more difficult things would come to mind. But Africa is all I knew and I loved it. I mean, aside from a few too many spiders, scorpions, centipedes, and even snakes. Specifically, it’s when these heinous things made it into my room that it became too personal. An eight-inch spider with red legs on your wall is just slightly traumatizing. Although I did drama and sports in school, I didn’t have many extracurricular opportunities, so sometimes I’ve envied people who feel incredibly adept in one area because they grew up doing it their whole lives. That being said, my life experience plays a part in everything I do, and I wouldn’t have traded it.

One of the hardest things I’ve been through is watching my parents get sick, but it was when they were close to death that God moved in the most powerful way I’ve seen. My mom’s been near death multiple times, one time notably when doctors thought she had MS, and again with a serious staph infection that prompted one doctor who lacked appropriate bedside manner to tell her to write her tombstone. Some of you may know she was healed while preaching in Toronto after being almost too weak to make it to the stage.

After going to Congo, Dad had post-traumatic stress syndrome coupled with malaria and mini-strokes that fired in his brain. Like almost any person who has grown up in ministry, I’m not one to over-spiritualize anything, but honestly it felt like a demonic principality was at work. He lost his memory for at least three months, grew lethargic and was pumped full of medication after being told his brain had shrunken and his organs were shutting down. After being prayed for daily by people around the world, being taken off his meds, and being pumped full of nutrients in Germany, he experienced radical transformation in his body, mind, and spirit. He came back a healthy man with restored memory and a vibrant personality, and is now flying our new ten-seat, turboprop plane, a miracle plane that has been his dream to fly. Hearing that I should prepare myself not to have my parents around is without a doubt the scariest thing I’ve had to hear, and their recoveries are the most radical miracles I’ve ever witnessed. I know they couldn’t do what they do without the prayer that covers them from around the world.

Like a lot of Christians I know who had Christian parents, I don’t remember a precise moment I got saved. I remember my mom reading children’s Bible storybooks to me in London and praying with me, but I couldn’t say exactly when it happened. Over the years I’ve experienced some radical moves of the Holy Spirit, and also some quirky mixes of human “stuff”—be it pain, insecurity, or pride woven in there—but to me that’s not the main point. What I find remarkable is even early on before I had experienced renewal myself or had much context for it, I never questioned whether it was God. I had a genuine love for the Lord early on, and I loved to sing and worship from the time I was little. In early high school I was involved in a dance ministry group with a number of Brazilian friends at a local Brazilian church, and we would minister at other churches as well. It was a meaningful experience to grow in the Lord with young peers and be accountable to friends in a really communal setting.

I watched the videos my parents brought back from Toronto with another one of my best friends, also a Brazilian, named Ruama. We were immediately impacted by what we saw. When we talked about it at school, I learned that not everyone shared our opinions that the type of emotional intensity you see in renewal could be from God. Those of us from Iris were quietly known as the strange ones. Later on I lost a couple friendships over it, but I also saw good friends from school who had never experienced the Holy Spirit in a powerful way fully encounter Him.