Recently Kathy and LaVerne Dyck spoke in church about their plans to spend a year in Russia, teaching historical Christianity, morals and ethics in the public schools.
I was empathetic with Kathy’s initial reaction, “Go to Russia!! No Way! That’s the enemy! We had to practice hiding under our school desks in case they dropped a bomb.”
I felt the same fear when our second son pent the summer with Teen Missions International (TMI) helping build a church in Odessa.
Other sons have spent a summer with TMI. TMI promises to keep teens out of dangerous situations and requires that the teens write home weekly. With a letter a week I don’t worry. It’s not worth the time.
When my oldest stepson went to Honduras with TMI during the time the guerrilla warfare was making the headlines, I was not worried. He only saw a couple of trucks with soldiers.
When my first son elected to go with TMI to Haiti to an orphanage, the year f the coup, I wasn’t concerned until several people asked if he was safe. Then I called TMI.
They assured me he was safe.
That 14-year-old son’s team was safe through a night spent in Port-au-Prince where he was told to stay inside the hotel.
He listened to the gunfire all night. He was safe through 20 road blockades bristling with rifles. He was still safe when he called us two weeks early from TMI headquarters in Florida, “TMI pulled us out. Haiti shut down the airport after we left.”
He came home with a lot less tan he took. He knew it had been stolen, but “Awww, Maw, those people needed that stuff worse than I did.” But he was safe and Ihad not wasted my time worrying.
As I did not worry when his youngest brother went to Australia. What is there to worry about in Australia?
Then my other son decided to help build a church in the Ukraine, a part of the old Soviet Union. We were warned before he left that mail service was sporadic.
OK, I thought, so they had a major political upheval last yaer, but how much can that affect the mail in a technologically advanced country?
An awful lot evidently.
No one got mail. Not the parents, not the teens and not TMI. By the fourth week, I hit the panic button. This was the old USSR. What happened to him after he got off the plane?
My husband assured me everything was fine. TMI assured me everything was fine. The father of a family in Camden whose daughter was on the same team assured me everything was fine. He did say though that his wife’s life rotated around the daily mail.
“But really,” he assured me, “there’s nothing to worry about.”
It did no good. I remember the Cold War headlines screaming of loved ones lost behind the Iron Curtains.
A month after he got there, the mail began coming. He got mail. I got mail. The family in Camden got mail.
I could think again. Truthfully I could breathe again.
Last year, he went with TMI to Indonesia with a week of debrief in Moscow. I was just fine.
And I have nothing to worry about this summer, either. He is staying stateside and working in Washington D.C. Area. It is much safer there.