Taking it serious, or not

According to the Wycliffe Global Alliance, there are still 1,800 languages, spoken by about 165 million people, who lack even a partial Bible translation.

In April, China banned more than 7,000 foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from engaging in or funding religious activities, reports the August issue of Christianity Today magazine. “The measure could expel Christian groups that are doing medical, developmental, or educational work in the world’s largest country by population, with 1.4 billion people. China’s move is significant because of the number of people affected. But other countries have been moving in this direction for years.”

A Middle Eastern underground house church leader is quoted saying in another CT article, “Persecution is easier to understand when it’s physical: torture, death and imprisonment . . . American persecution is like an advanced stage of cancer; it eats away at you, and you cannot feel it. This is the worst kind of persecution.”

Skimming through books the other day in the “spiritual section” at Barnes & Noble, I came across the New York Times bestseller autobiography Traveling Mercies, written by ever-popular non-fiction author Anne Lamott. On one page, the San Francisco resident confessed: “I thought about my life and my brilliant, hilarious progressive friends, I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen. I turned to the wall and said out loud, ‘I would rather die.’ ”

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What I thought was a simple trip home to enjoy a long weekend celebrating Labor Day has turned into an unexpected goodbye to my hometown and to the house and neighborhood I’ve known all my life. This might be it for me and northeastern Ohio.

I was five years old when my parents sold our own house (the current one is my grandparents') in Akron and moved the family to San Jose, Costa Rica for a year of “training” to become missionaries in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador. We went to school with other missionary children from around the world as my parents attended school along with adult missionaries from all different denominations and organizations across the globe.

The other day, as I helped my mom clean out the house and pack up, she asked me if I wanted a little decorative ceramic skillet made in Norway that was a long-ago gift sent by my dad’s Norwegian relatives.

This led her to recall how the wife of a missionary couple from Norway who were friends of our family in Costa Rica made these unique little Scandinavian-style pancakes.

She mentioned the other missionary couple from Norway we knew there, telling me how the husband would complain about America and even the missionary group sponsoring him, specifically for making a currency exchange on U.S. donations rather than just allowing him to take the cash. 

She said, “I finally told your dad that I had had enough of hearing this (Norwegian) continually tear down my country and I wouldn’t be a part of it any longer. He didn’t say anything, but then how could he give me a hard time; he wouldn’t even attend the school. He'd go swimming all day at Ojo de Agua, telling me the lifeguard was teaching him Spanish."