My daughter, Lydia, has been a full time missionary for two years. This morning she left for a two-month trip to Asia. By the end of this year she will have spent five of the last twenty-four months in Asia. For this trip, she is going into parts of Asia that I cannot mention on a public post like this, because it could put her at risk to be blacklisted by the country not mentioned. Don’t get the idea this will ever look like a vacation for this team of young missionaries she is leading.

There are no beaches where they are going. There won’t be any weekends with sand between their toes. In fact, there are a lot of things that won’t be there. There won’t be warm water. There won’t be American/European toilets. There won’t be warm showers. There won’t be beds.

What will there be? There will be bucket bathing. There will be sleeping bags and mosquito nets. There will be five-hour buss rides. There will be hand-washing clothing. There will be orphanages with starving children who witnessed the death of their parents. There will be hiking into remote parts of foreign countries.

Missions work is changing. We have a lot of missionaries coming through our church who are venturing into parts of this world nobody in America has even heard of. They are risking their lives to take the message of Christ to people who have never heard of it, and may become angry when they do. They spend their days trying to get young women out of the sex trade industry. They are separated from family and friends for years. They miss birthdays, anniversaries and holidays. They do this day after day and year after year.

Nothing they do resembles an American’s idea of fun. Simply put, it’s the hardest work possible. It’s taking the great commission seriously, and being willing to take it places that have never heard of it. It’s believing that everyone deserves something that every soul longs for. It’s believing that everyone in the world needs hope. Not hope of financial prosperity. That’s American. Not the hope of happiness. That’s something that depends on surroundings.

It’s about the hope of salvation. It’s about having real joy. Joy that is found on the inside when we begin a relationship with the creator of the universe. A Creator who withheld nothing from a wold He created and loves. A Creator who removed every obstacle from being reconciled with Him.

Lydia is a part of a necessary movement. It’s a movement that says, “We will not let anything or anyone get in the way of taking this important message into all the world. We want to make Him known in all the world. We don’t care how hard it will be. We just want to know how to get there.”

If you want to support Lydia, please click HERE!

This past weekend I was able to (legally) take my oldest daughter, Lydia, driving. She finished the classroom portion of Driver’s Ed a couple of weeks ago, and last Monday Julie took her to take the exam to get her Learner’s Permit. She passed and received the license.

I decided the safest place for Lydia to begin learning to drive was one of the newer sub-divisions in town. There are not many houses in the area, so the traffic, both auto and foot, is quite light. She practiced left and right turns. She practiced using her signals. We even found time to practice going backwards. After an hour or so we decided to get a little more adventurous and head to Grain Valley. It is a short drive using back roads. She did quite well, and after a couple of hours we called it an evening.

On Saturday Julie decided to come along for the ride. I noticed that anytime we came to a stop my seat belt would tighten. After about a dozen times I finally realized it was Julie in the back seat. She kept trying to use her brakes and was inadvertently pressing against where my seat belt comes up out of the floor. At that point I noticed I was pushing against the floor as well.

Finally, Julie and I both started to harp on Lydia a little when she was coming to a stop sign. She wasn’t hitting her brakes far enough ahead of the stop, so Julie and I felt that she wasn’t going to stop at all. Neither of us could handle the uncertainty any longer, and Lydia was becoming noticeably frustrated.

Finally, I realized something. I had never given Lydia the slightest idea when to start using the brake. Here we were yelling at her, and she can’t figure out what she is doing wrong. Finally, I wised up and told her, “I will start letting you know when I would start using the brake if I was driving.” That plan made perfect sense to her, and in less than an hour she was making smoother stops.

I do this in my parenting as well. I just assume my kids know the rules of the road. When they don’t perform the way I expect, I bark at them. To them I am coming out of left field, and they have no clue what they are doing wrong. I focus on what is happening in the moment. I am completely oblivious to the fact that they are just performing based on what they have been told. I’m operating on years of experience, and my kids are operating on minutes.

There is nothing worse than trying to perform under unknown expectations.

Proverbs 22:6

Train up a child in the way he should go,
And when he is old he will not depart from it.