Culture Shock!!! part 2 of 3

Once you get over the excitement and denial, you move to anger. I thought that I had conquered my temper when I was a teenager. Boy, was I wrong! As Isobel Khun said, "When you move to the mission field, the scum of your nature rises to the top." I was angry all the time. I remember one time when Carey was about a year old, and the younger brother of our butcher (he was about 18 years old) told me that he was going to marry my daughter. When I ssw that he was serious, I almost killed him. I was so mad that if I had not left the shop, I think that I would have exploded! The hard thing was that I did not "take it out" on those in the outside world, but on my family. They were safe, so I would just explode at them. This is when the internal conflict began, the breaking. I looked at my own relfection in the pool of my depravity, and I was shocked by what I saw. I was so angry, so afraid, so sinful! There were times I hated Ghana and its people. I hate to say that, but it was true. I did not know myself. I thought that I was this great missionary, this gift to the 21st century missionfield. But that was just the beginning.

Most men learn to live their lives by knowledge. Each wants to be the master of his world. Men learn, study, and control. We learn what to expect and how to react. When you move to the mission field you are like a grown man that has become a baby again. You have to learn to talk, to think, to understand. One thing that is very hard is dealing with sin. In your home country you have learned to fight sin there, you knows its tactics, its language, its style. You feel confident that you have developed as a Christian and can face most problems that come your way. Then you go to the missionfield. With all this grief, you are in knots internally. You don't know which way is up. You are an emotional wreck. Remember, the Devil is a roaring lion, and just like a lion, he waits until you are confused and distracted to attack. He knows that if he can kill you, he gets the whole family. It was hard the first time I heard that roar!

I remember that I felt so weak. I felt that I was just limping along, just trying to make it to furlough. Then it stood before me ~ my flesh in all of its horror, ugliness, and power. Anger, lust, temptation, fear, greed, discontentment, jealousy... I thought things, felt things, did things, that rocked me to the core! You cry out for mercy! You start to see that you are not the person that you thought at all. You say with the words of Paul, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

I have learned why most missionaries quit after first term: they are running from themselves! When you see yourself on the field, you are naked and bare before the world. There, your old man cries out for attention, and you have to face it. The funny thing is that you can run, but you will never be able to hide from it. It shares the same house as your new man, and for the rest of your life you will bump into him! The problem is that missionaries start to believe that the place is the problem, not the person. That is why they run! But they are running from the wrong thing.

Once you pass the anger, you begin to bargain. If God will let you just make it until furlough, or even better, have some missions agency or college call you off the field, then you will serve Him faithfully at home the rest of your life. You bargain with God, your family, yourself. The thing that the missionary has to be very careful about is bargaining with the Devil. At this time, you hear that hissing voice a lot. It is telling you that God is holding something back, that God does not care, that you are alone. There were times that I followed after some piece of forbidden fruit, thinking that it would end the pain, but God's great grace was always there to stop me before I took the bite! By this time the ground is plowed, the stones turned up, and you are broken.