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Have you heard the expression “Boots on the Ground?” Well our Live Dead Missionaries are the boots on the Silk Road. Here we’d like to take a moment and allow one of them to share a snapshot of their life with you. Some names and details have been changed, but this is a true story from this colorful, vibrant, and sometimes surprising region.

“Culture shock” is the big buzzword when talking about packing up and moving to a foreign country. Even the most prepared of us has been surprised by culture shock – when it hits, how long it lasts, and when it crops up again and again.

And culture shock doesn’t only affect us, but our kids too.

Even at two and a half years old, our son knew enough about his American world that he understood our new life in Central Eurasia as strange and uncomfortable. He came from a culture in which people do not make physical contact with non-related children, where he already had formed opinions on his culinary preferences, and where he had just begun to master the English language. Suddenly he was thrust into a place where every stranger was pinching his cheeks and bellowing at him in unintelligible sounds, where smells and tastes and styles were so different from what he was used to.

He scowled a lot for our first few months here.

I was that same age, two and a half, when my parents moved our family to a foreign country, so I look to my parents as an invaluable resource when wondering, “How do I do this?” There are many well-intentioned people with platitudes about the resilience of children, but it doesn’t settle that innate worry we have as moms. In my mom’s words,

We shouldn’t downplay our children’s culture shock. Just because they are little doesn’t mean they won’t go through it.

But, we can help them through it.

In a recent conversation, my mom was telling me about a time when my older
sister was dealing with depression after our family came back from a year of support raising in the States. She was maybe nine years old. My parents felt sort of helpless, but did their best to encourage her to pray with them and on her own. Mom said, “She got filled with the Holy Spirit that summer and it was a ‘game changer’ — she really learned how to rely on God.”

Fast forward

Our son is four and a half years old now and more often than scowling he will rattle on with confidence about astronauts and dinosaurs – things that are important to preschoolers – in his new language. Like normal preschooler trials, such as potty training and naptime battles, culture shock has faded into a memory of the past. Not that it was a piece of cake. Not that he is not going to deal with culture shock again. But I can help him through it, and the missionaries who have paved that trail before me will help me.

And ultimately the Lord will be our helper through it all.

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