I have an attitude about my homeland that, I guess, must have come about because I’ve lived in a third world country before. Maybe everyone should try it for awhile. It just seemed like something I took for granted – that nobody in their right mind would actually choose to do that.
During the summer of 1964, when I was seven, my family parked our cute little trailer on a friend’s farm. Then, we went to Hawaiian Gardens, California, and lived there in one of my grandfather’s apartments. Dad was sent to the Philippines for a two-year tour of duty. We could go along with him since he would be gone so long, but he had to find a house for us to rent first.
Shortly before Christmas, Dad sent for us, and our family boarded a military transport (or “hop”) to get to the Philippines the cheap way.
Though I was glad to see my dad again after several months’ separation, the Philippines, or “the P.I.” never impressed me. It wasn’t like we ever went to the sandy island beaches to sunbathe. We did have a typhoon.
I don’t know for sure. I have never been back to the P.I. since 1965. Maybe now Manila is modern and clean with air conditioned buildings everywhere. Maybe they have gotten rid of the cannibals in the jungle. Maybe the open air garbage truck pulled by the carabao has been replaced with a modern compactor-style truck such as those that come rumbling through Burrows. Maybe the guards at the gate of the housing division where we lived no longer steal your pet dog and roast her with rice.
Boomby, who escaped and was presumed eaten.
I know that I was young and it was a long time ago, but there is an important comparison I can make.
Exhibit A. On Good Friday, 1964, in the P.I., my mom took us to a parade which featured people walking down the street whipping themselves on the back to make themselves bleed, and a few others who chose to be crucified for a while in the hot sun, to try to prove their devotion to God and earn their way to Heaven. I remember the stench of sweaty bodies, the blood that was splashed on us, and how my mom was so traumatized that she accidentally ran the sewing machine needle through her finger when we got home.
Exhibit B. On New Year’s Day, 1975, my mom and I went to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California. Maybe I don’t have to describe that to you, but I remember the bold colors and the scent of millions and millions of flower petals.
Can you see the difference?
I was really glad that we went to the school on Clark AFB – Wurtsmith Elementary School. Every morning, very very early, the blue Air Force bus came through our housing division. We were taken to the Air Force base to have school in a World War II era quonset hut. Then we returned home before the hottest part of the day began. It was a little weird to be going to school where once or twice we kids found an unexploded bomb on the playground. But at least most of the time our teachers and fellow-students spoke English, with the exception of the Filipino student teacher who was trying to teach us new words in Science, with a heavy Tagalog accent.
We were asked to decide whether we wanted white milk or chocolate milk with our school lunch. Most kids – or actually practically all the kids – wanted chocolate milk, but I was already a health conscious youngster and I chose white milk. What I didn’t know at the time was that all the milk was shipped in. The Philippines didn’t have dairy cows! And because of the outrageous temperatures, the milk would spoil, so they just sent dry milk and it was reconstituted before it was put into the little paper cartons. I am a quick learner, though. The chocolate helped to improve the taste, so I was all-in by the next week.
Our house only had large fans and I was perpetually hot and sticky. I always wanted Mom to make me dresses out of the thinnest fabric she could find, and was always very disappointed when she told me I would have to wear a slip.
So I did nothing but read – a lot! I became as inactive as possible, and the extra weight I put on from that policy only served to make life more miserable. If ordered outside, I would hide in a shrub.
We had a housegirl and a houseboy, who worked cheap. They lived in the barrios and it didn’t take much to sustain them, so the housegirl cleaned the house and waxed the floor red with a mosquito repellant, and the houseboy did the yardwork. We were told never to walk outside barefoot because the water around that place in the backyard was actually sewage, and if you walked in it, you could get hookworms. The housegirl did our laundry in a wringer washer and hung it up to dry on a clothesline, but I was afraid to go back there myself.
Rennie and Dan playing in a sprinkler hooked up to the clothesline.
The laundry was done in the building to the left.
Dad picked up a virus called Mènére’s Disease that affected his inner ear and made him dizzy. He still has that.
And those mosquitoes! They were like demon drones. If you dared to leave the car windows down overnight, in the morning, you’d better bring the pepper spray with you before you entered the car with all the enemy combatants lurking in the shadows. My mom decided to play a trick on her stepmother, who was always writing her with news she’d read about how the Philippines was a terrible place. She found the biggest cockroach she could, one that was about as big as a business size envelope, somehow killed it without destroying its form, and stuffed it into the envelope. Then she wrote that she was enclosing one of the smaller cockroaches, because the big ones didn’t fit into the envelopes.
The income from working for us really helped our native domestic servants, and it helped our housegirl get her education. At school we learned a song about the Philippine national house – the nipa hut. Since we didn’t live in a nipa hut, but in a real house, that meant that we were the “rich Americans.”
There were three times that I remember very well, that were remarkably happy times while we lived in the P.I.:
My dad did have 30 days of paid vacation. That was always a little mysterious to me because I didn’t know why he wasn’t going to work. When I was younger, I thought I should help the family because my dad was unemployed, so I told people’s fortunes. (Like I could!) But now that I was eight, I understood more, and we were so happy to be able to go to John Hay Air Base in Baguio, up in the mountains, for some R & R during Dad’s vacation. We brought home some souvenirs from Baguio, including a carved wooden headhunter and a carved game of Sunka. I don’t know who ended up with the headhunter, but I got the Sunka game.
My dad’s brother, Uncle Sam, was in the U.S. Navy, and once his ship docked in the Philippines. We went to see him and he gave us a tour. I was young and didn’t have the words so I called it a “boat” and asked if we could see the “steering wheel,” to which Uncle Sam strongly objected. This was tremendous for me, kind of like Laura Ingalls when the mail train finally came through. Although Uncle Sam didn’t bring any mail, we did get ice cream!
And then, there was the incident at the U.S. embassy. I still don’t know why we had to go there, but when we did, we walked into the United States of America. It was as if we had been transported to another location, like Narnia. Or like Heaven. I was home again! And we had ice cream! (Notice a pattern here?)
And this is my point. I have grown up in the United States of America. There has been no other country as sound, as peaceful, as heroic and generous, as clean and prosperous, as the United States. She is my home and I love her!
When we send our children overseas – like when Chris went to Mexico and Nicaragua, or when Susie went to St. Kitts and Kyrgyzstan, or when Vivian went to Myanmar – we send them there to minister. They are there to bring education, or food, or clothing, or some other help to those less fortunate. They are less fortunate because they have not known the Lord Jesus Christ. Missionaries are able to bring the Gospel message. Some will stay with their missions country. I know missionaries in Latvia, Ukraine, China, and Managua, who have stayed there long-term and embraced the people to whom they minister. But not many would be willing to give up their U.S. citizenship. At least, they would have to think very hard and pray about that before they did, because America is their home.
Why, then, would anyone want to turn our nation, our home, into an atheistic third world country like the ones we have been helping, feeling sorry for, and praying for all these years?
Why would we want what Russia has had – persecution of Christians, torture, and imprisonment under Communist rule?
Why would anyone want what my dad saw in Saudi Arabia under Islam? When he came home from being stationed there in 1955, he had pictures of a beheading, and a severed hand and foot from someone who had been caught stealing and tried to run away.
In Communist China, the leaders tear down churches, and forcibly abort babies and sterilize women so that there is virtually no such thing to most people as a “brother,” a “sister,” an “aunt,” an “uncle,” or a “cousin.” Or, if someone is so bold as to give their child a sibling, their entire family is stigmatized. If you believe in any deity other than the president of China, you run the risk of imprisonment with torture. There are crematoriums built near the Uyghur “reeducation” camps. Have we already forgotten Tiananmen Square?
In Haiti, there is voodoo and abject poverty. In Nicaragua, there are open dumps – where people live, find food, and scavenge items to sell, or to wear. In Mexico, the drug cartels run everything.
In the third world, there is poverty, hunger, disease, hopelessness, and a lack of resources. Our nation has all the answers to these. They are wrapped up in Jesus Christ, who has abundantly blessed our nation because it was founded on a fundamental belief in God and in those Judeo-Christian values you find in His Book – the rule of law, the equality of all people, and the God-given freedoms of those people to live, to work, to speak, and to move within the boundaries of the law. The framers of our Constitution acknowledged that our rights come from God, embraced God’s Book, and arranged our government in accordance with the Book, as God’s avenger over evil and protector of the family unit.
God is all over our founding documents, our money, and our monuments. Do you sometimes feel America has lost her footing? It is when we disregard our godly heritage and trade it for worship of something else that we begin to look more like a third world country than a first world one. America, wake up! Did you know that there are missions groups in other countries who have felt God calling them to the United States to share the Gospel message with our heathen nation?
If I have learned anything in my travels, it is to appreciate that “There’s no place like home.” Coming back from the Philippines, my family drove out to the farm where our trailer had been stored. I found that the built-in cabinets in the bathroom had shrunk! It was weird! Then, that trailer, along with the vacation trailer Dad had built, found a new home in Sergeant Bluff, Iowa, across from the high school baseball field.
Me, shortly after settling in our new home in Sgt. Bluff, Iowa.
Our main trailer is to the right, and the vacation trailer is to the left.
How American it was, to watch through the chain link fence, and see the Little League teams running around the bases in the summer!
I finally learned how to ride my bike there because the roads in the P.I. had been too rocky for a timid beginner. Yes, Iowa, though I had never been there before, was home.
My 10th Birthday, and my first bike
So now, here’s what Eric and I read Sunday morning, in Psalm 84:
1 How lovely is Your tabernacle, O LORD of hosts!
2 My soul longs, yes, even faints For the courts of the LORD; My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.
4 Blessed are those who dwell in Your house; They will still be praising You. Selah
10 For a day in Your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness.
Eric and I read this beautiful passage about living in the house of God and how the soul longs for that lovely and rich place, and discussed between ourselves the glories, not only of the tabernacle God inhabited in the midst of the children of Israel, but of the heavenly home where we will live with God forever.
Then, upon retrieving my phone later that morning, I got the news that the wife of my Real Brother had passed away the previous night, after battling Huntington’s Disease for twelve years. So I called him. Although I had been too lazy to go back downstairs to grab my phone and had missed his middle of the night call, I was glad that I had some fresh manna for him when I finally got to talk with him. God’s Word is new every morning!
And this is what He was telling us, among other things. Janet, Mike’s wife, had been longing for the Courts of the Lord for a long time. She knew the Savior. She knew He would be waiting for her. But like the child who cannot understand why a journey is taking so long, towards the end, the oft-repeated refrain was, “Are we there yet?” And then, like young Margie stepping into the U.S. Embassy in the Philippines, Janet was suddenly there, finally … home.
Deep inside, we all want to go home. Lisa may remember when her friend’s grandmother was appalled because Lisa was sighing about how she just wished she could go to Heaven NOW. This grandmother thought Lisa was morbid and suicidal, but I assured her that Lisa just understood, maybe better than we did, how beautiful and how desirable Heaven is.
If we know the Savior, the end of life here means finally being able to go there, to our real home.
So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord.
For we walk by faith, not by sight.
We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord. ~2 Cor. 5:6-8
And now that Janet is home, that’s where she wants to stay, waiting for the rest of us. Who would choose a Third World World over the First World World? Not me – no more than I would want to live in Venezuela!
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