Yesterday my sweet wife and I had long and really insightful meeting with a new friend and mentor of ours who works for World Venture. We got to know him through a mutual friend whose family is ministering in Ghana.

I could say quite a bit about the incredibly healthy and life giving philosophical and practical methods that got us excited about World Venture, but that’s not what hit me most in our meeting yesterday. There were other things our friend said that are still swimming in my head.

We asked him about the life of a wife and mother in international service. Our friend’s words blew me away. He talked about his family’s nearly 20 years of service in the Philippines. He told me that for all of the work he would do out in the city, at the schools, and in the church…it was when people were in his home that God worked most noticeably. He said,

The home is the validation for your ministry. People see all the other stuff you do, but when they meet your wife and kids and see how your family really is, then the truth of who you represent and what you’re doing sinks in.

There’s a big sinfully proud part of me that would say, “Oh yeah, of course. I know that.” But to look a man in the eyes who has been there and done it tell you this, it’s powerful, sobering. He was laughing at himself as he thought back on all the things he would pour himself into, good things, eternal things, but it just seemed that all the progress happened because of the testimony of his family by how they lived.

He said that the wife sets the tone of the home. He wasn’t espousing egalitarianism. What he was saying is that often in international work the husband is out and about more than the wife, at least for first while. Because of this, the wife is setting the tone in the house in his absence. He said,

If she goes out just enough to survive, just to the store and back, to the school and back…the kids pick up on that and adopt a belief that the culture around them is something they don’t want to touch.

When the conversation turned to how children adjust to frequent relocation and such, his comment was

How mom and dad relate is everything. If they see that dad loves mom, and mom loves dad, the kids will follow their lead through anything. If mom and dad aren’t ok, the children will never be ok, they’ll always be unsettled.

Again, on one hand what he said was not earth-shattering. But as I sit with it, it’s bringing more insight all the time. I posted awhile back about the tensions of family/ministry. His comments are helping me to see that caring for Christina and the girls is more than caring for Christina and the girls, as vitally important as that is. It’s not “my first ministry is my family”. To think like that is to divide up, compartmentalize life. No, caring for my wife and daughters is as much a part of my ministry to the church and world as preaching, teaching, leading or whatever else the Lord brings.

I’m fumbling a bit to get clear thoughts out, but suffice to say the Lord helped me immensly through that meeting.