As Western cross cultural workers, the access we have to information, communication, and connection back to our “passport country”  is unprecedented.

This has been a tremendous blessing, but it also creates challenges that missionaries going to the field a hundred years ago didn’t have to face.

Today, we live in a global travel and information society.

Missionaries must live in between two worlds.

We can physically be just about anywhere in the world in a day or less.  Through the internet, we can stay connected like no other time in human history.  The two worlds of our “passport country” and our mission field intersect now on a regular basis.

These realities make family choices different for today’s cross cultural worker than they were for our pioneering forefathers.

Missionaries who left home back then left with very little thought of ever coming back home.  The possibility of it was not readily available.  They left everything behind and traveled to new lands with their wife and children to begin a new life in a new land.  Most were basically cut off from their homeland except for the occasional report sent back by handwritten letter.  The journey to get to their new home took months of travel by boat.

More often than not, upon arrival their children were educated in local schools or taught at home with little resources.  They were totally immersed in their new culture’s life with little information of what was happening in their home country and culture.

There was no Skype conference calls to check in with grandma and grandpa.  There was no visits back to the home land where they would be compared to their friends and relatives their age socially and culturally.  They did not have to compete in global educational standards and worry about the possibility having to return home in the middle of the educational years only to find out that their children were behind a grade or more because the standards were so different.

On the more dangerous side, there was very little available in regards to hospitals, medical treatments, and no chance of helicoptered medi-vacs if the children faced serious illness.  In fact, history records that many of these pioneer missionaries and their families died within months of arriving on the field.

If they made it through the disease and other threats on their lives their mission field, they still faced the loneliness that came from being cut off from the outside world.  Obviously, there was a price to be paid for the decision to follow Jesus’s commands and take the Gospel to the nations.

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