How Did You Navigate Raising Your Child on the Mission Field?

How did you navigate raising your child on the mission field?

Family is always a challenge overseas. My son was four years old when we moved into Yembiyembi. He grew up, spent 13 years there on site, and my wife and I did our very best parenting him. We actually teach a class at Radius now called How to Raise Normal MKs. That's not meant to mean that our son is the epitome of normalcy, but there are a lot of challenges in raising MKs overseas. I was thankful I had a good wife who really thought through some of the aspects of how to raise Beau in an environment that was going to be very different.

How to navigate him speaking English, then speaking Melanesian Pidgin, then speaking Bises, popping from Yembiyembi all the way back to San Diego, California—just some key things that we tried to keep our eye on were making sure that he was understanding the cultures from both sides, highlighting both environments depending on if we were going from the U.S. back to Yembiyembi or Yembiyembi back to the U.S., and just keeping the Word primary in our time as a family.

We made sure that he was grounded in the Word and knew his role in the teaching. He wasn't going to stand up and teach, but we said, “Beau, your job is to make sure that you keep quiet and that you read your book alongside. And if any of your friends after the teaching want to talk about what's happening, man, you're going to talk to them about that stuff and you're going to encourage them in that.”

We wanted this to not be Mom and Dad's thing. We wanted this to be our family's thing that God has called us to. And we, by God's grace, I think, were able to achieve a large degree of that.