Beth's Story  
 

            When I was five years old, my parents made a decision that even now continues to shape who I am.  They joined Wycliffe Bible Translators, making me into a missionary kid.  Less than a month after my eighth birthday, my family moved to the Philippines.  For the next six years, the life I lived was very unusual by American standards -- full of climbing fruit trees, eating exotic foods, hearing a myriad of languages, being stared at by crowds in open-air markets, and living for months at a time with no electricity or running water.

            Having been back to the U.S. only once, for a furlough when I was eleven, I had difficulty readjusting to American culture after we returned home permanently when I was fourteen.  Public school seemed huge and overwhelming, popular trends were a mystery to me, and the teenagers I met all seemed shallow.  I did not belong in America.  But I knew that even if I returned to the Philippines, it would not be the same since many of my close friends had moved away as well.  My heart was suddenly homeless.

            During my high school years I gradually learned to blend in, and by the time I began attending Wingate University in North Carolina, I appeared to be completely comfortable with life in the U.S.   Occasionally, when friends learned that I had grown up in the Philippines, they would remark, "You're a missionary kid?  But, you're so. . . normal!"  Still , I knew that no matter how American I appeared to be, I was something else internally -- a person suspended between two worlds, not fitting entirely into either one.  I felt that no one would ever understand me.

            In June, 1997, I was invited to a Bible study at the JAARS center.  There I met a roomful of other missionary kids, people who knew what it was like to grow up between cultures.  One of those MKs was a handsome youth ministry student named Mike.  As I got to know Mike over the next few months, I was relieved to find that I did not need to explain my MK eccentricities to him!  We were married on June 10, 2000, and eleven days before our first anniversary we were joined by our daughter Leigh.

            Joining Wycliffe to work with teenage missionary kids makes sense for us.  As much as I enjoyed our years in traditional church youth ministry, I feel that Mike and I have been uniquely equipped for ministering to MKs and their families as they deal with struggles we can understand.