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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.

When we first arrived and exited the plane the culture shock was immense and pervasive. Nothing looked or felt familiar.

I remember standing in a grocery market not being able to read any labels, having no idea what I was even putting in my grocery basket. “If I can’t even find the items on my grocery list, how will I ever feed my family?” Why can’t just ONE thing be easy? We moved in with a local family almost immediately. They had just bought a new oven, albeit small, for our use. Did I mention the oven temperature was in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit? The second week in, my husband and our son left for the weekend with the father of our host family. It seemed like a good time to attempt my first home cooked meal in this new place. It was a simple pasta dish. Surely I could do this. The oven had a glass stovetop. I knew how to use a glass stovetop. Finally…something familiar. While I cooked, my 6-week old baby sat in a bouncy seat on the floor of our itty-bitty kitchen. My 2-year-old daughter sat coloring at our tiny two-person kitchen table.

Shattered Pieces

I started to brown the hamburger on the glass stovetop of the brand new stove. Just as I had nearly finished the meal, there was a huge explosion. The glass stovetop shattered, exploding into a million pieces. I froze and looked around at my girls there in the kitchen with me. We were all surrounded by tiny pieces of broken glass. Miraculously, there was not a scratch on any of us. I picked the girls up, put them in another room, returned to the kitchen, sat down and cried. And then I got on my hands and knees and spent the evening cleaning up tiny pieces of glass, with tears still flowing. My first meal was an absolute failure. My morale: at the lowest. “I can’t even cook a simple meal,” I thought.

That was one awful day. But joy comes now when I look back at that moment and realize how far I’ve come.

And now, 2 years later, I love cooking for my family and enjoy inviting guests over for meals. As it turns out, that glass stovetop wasn’t a glass stovetop after all. It was just a glass cover. Had I lifted it up before using the burners, my pasta would have turned out fine! Oops.

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