My story: How being a missionary opened the door to finding myself

Some years into our marriage my wife and I finally had the opportunity to pursue the life mission we had shared when we first came together: we became missionaries. Yes, you read that correctly, I was a Christian missionary. In the environment in which I grew up and for me personally in my youth I could not think of a higher purpose for my life. Yet after university we had loan debts to pay, I went on to graduate school, then we had children and the whole idea seemed like a pipe dream, until fairly suddenly it wasn’t. Because my focus here is not on that journey, I won’t give further details, but after many years of doing other things we found ourselves moving to Russia with our two children, who were four and nearly seven years old.

Not surprisingly, as a missionary there isn’t much room for questioning one’s identity. People (that is, your home church(es) and your ministry partners, and generally your co-workers as well) pretty much expect you to have your shit together. Struggles and doubts of any kind (talk with missionaries about mental health issues, or family problems if you want to explore this!) are not really welcome or understood. During these years I lived a seemingly normal life in my adopted gender. Probably the only indication of my true identity was my continued inclination to form primary relationships with the women around me, which wasn’t really normal in the cultures we lived and worked in (we moved on to a second country after several years in Russia), nor was it considered typical in the missionary community. But the people I was closest to and remember most fondly from those years are all women.

Those years overseas were wonderful in many ways and very exhausting in others. You pour yourself into work that you believe is valuable, but month to month you don’t know whether you will have enough money to live on (we had no guaranteed income) and, at least in the countries we worked in, you never know whether you will be able to stay from year to year or even month to month. You often feel forgotten by those back home. And that’s not to speak of adapting to life in another culture. I’m glad I had the opportunity and I feel that I contributed the best I could, but in the end I think those years also broke me, and probably my marriage.

Perhaps ironically, it was those years overseas that prompted me to explore issues that would prove important when I began to reevaluate my identity. As I observed the treatment and role of women in the cultures where we lived and worked, I became increasingly angry about the perception of women in our world. I recognized that it was not just those cultures either, for my own culture has miles to go in terms of affirming the full equality of women. I saw that many missionaries (not all!) merely propagated the secondary role of women because their own views placed women as subservient to men. (I could go off on a whole series of posts just about that.) I became, and I am not ashamed to say this, a feminist, someone who believes that women are fully equal to men and deserve to be treated so. As I recognized and claimed this perspective for my own, I think I also resonated with it more deeply, though I could not have put it into words at the time. This wasn’t just about me as a man standing with women (though I think that is essential as well), but me identifying with the women of the world in a deeper way – not so surprising in retrospect.

Five years ago my family returned home for what was intended to be a short vacation to see our families. (We didn’t get to see them often at all, due to the cost of flying four people halfway around the world.) Some medical needs on the part of one child compelled us to make a last minute decision to remain in the United States, a decision that was completely the right one, but which unlocked all the brokenness of the years overseas. Suddenly I (as well as my spouse, though that’s her story), found ourselves without focus or purpose. No longer in the thick of the work and living back in the US, we dropped off the radar of our missionary colleagues very quickly. I’m not saying that they didn’t care about us, but it certainly felt like we were “out of sight, out of mind.” We tried to maintain our connection to the work, but without the support of those who had financially made it possible, nor the active assistance of our colleagues in the organization, this proved extremely difficult and disheartening. I remember sitting on my bed one day pouring out tears because I had no idea what I was about anymore.

This brokenness, the complete collapse of my world, despite all the pain it has caused (and still does, at times), provided the key to unlock the secrets I had hidden away for so long. As I examined my life, searching way back to my childhood, I looked at who I am and who I had been throughout my life. I had tried to live the life of the devout Christian man, only to see it collapse into nothing. Looking at my life I became aware of the threads I have written about previously and began to wonder, what if those things were not an aberration? What if they are not something I must be ashamed of and hide? What if that is really who I am?