I got a call from our 20 year old daughter Jo the other day. She is a missions major at Nyack College in New York, and one of her classes this semester is “Cross Cultural Adjustment”. In this course, they practice living in different cultural situations, visit a variety of ethnic churches in New York City, shop at open air markets, and have other cross cultural experiences that are relevant to future missionaries.

She called to tell me about a conversation in class. Some of the challenges they’ve had to experience so far include going a week without changing their clothes and going another week where they can only shower with buckets of cold water. Speaking of the former of these two challenges (there are many more are promised for the near future ) the professor said, “I can tell that this is making a lot of you uncomfortable. Not Jo, though; I just don’t know how to push her buttons. “

He was the same professor who led Jo’s Christmas vacation trip to Cambodia and Thailand, where Jo not only ate the tarantula served to her upon arrival, but ate one that a friend was unable to make herself consume. This is the same trip on which Jo ate a dish of congealed blood from a street vendor in Bangkok. In many ways she is tailor suited for third world missions work.

But the real reason she called was to thank me for how we raised her. She said that spending every summer of her life at summer camps around New England, our multiple missions trips to Latin America and Crow Agency, allowing her to spend the first month of her senior year in an orphanage in Kenya, sleeping on church basements with her middle school students and Sundays spent in juvenile correctional facilities were all experiences that prepared her for this time and for her future.

I spend a lot of time fretting, and a common stressor for me is whether
our unconventional life style has been good for our girls. It was a huge encouragement to me to hear this reassurance from our oldest daughter.