Because of cancer, our life in 2025 took an abrupt turn. A turn that cost us deeply: our home, community, much of our day to day job and purpose, our view of the future, our normal life. One of the hidden truths of mission is usually it's strength: the weaving and braiding of spiritual, social, labour, recreational, family roles. But this year, it extracts a deeper toll. The overlaps mean that a medical issue is not easily boxed into a limited sector. Everything is impacted.
Returning to America this year has been its own paradox. Months of draining but effective treatments. Learning to work remotely. So thankful for that. But entering into a country whose leaders pit followers into 'us vs. them' divisions, a country marred by political violence, a church floundering to find a foothold of faith that engages with integrity in the communal debates, that is tempted to shortcut the slow work of persuasion by the power of force.
In August we finished 56 rounds of radiation treatment, continuing on 3 intense medications for the foreseeable future but sensing the progress. In September we were able to travel for Serge leadership meetings, and even take a hiking week in the Dolomites of south Tyrol. But while we were gone, Charlie Kirk was assassinated and we returned to a new level of fracture in our home country. Every day we continue to pray, bank, supervise, support our East and Central Africa teams, all of whom are inching good forward in locally relevant ways, living and preaching the good news. But every day we are also bombarded by the news here where we live. And America's angst has an outsize impact on the world. So forgive us for diverting to a few hopefully globally true thoughts.
1. 2025 confirms that being human requires us to distinguish good from evil. There are few things we can agree on, but if you listen, most people seem to agree that there is a difference. Murdering a politician in their home (MN) or at a rally (UT) to silence opposition is always evil, no matter how much we disagree with their rhetoric. Likewise others of the once-foundational ten commandments still hold some sway. Stealing, cheating, lying, greed, unfaithfulness remain undesirable acts that make common life impossible, and so need to be restrained. The Bible talks a LOT about how we treat the poor and stranger, how we love or hate each other. Distinguishing good from evil matters. We need to live and speak in ways that promote good and call out evil, and democracy allows us to keep striving for common good and keep dismantling systemic evils.
2. The line between good and evil runs through every single human heart. (Solzhenitsyn, and the Bible). NO ONE is fully evil, or fully good. We have heard the language of spiritual warfare brought into politics without the key phase of Ephesians 6: our struggle is not against flesh and blood. People are not, individually or as a group, unredeemable enemies. Evil is not a human person.
3. Winning is not the point. We are manipulable when we fear losing. Hate is a powerful force, but love will outlast it. And love has an arc of losing. Losing self, losing will, losing plans, losing fame. Love's symbol is the cross. When we choose risk, choose personal cost for the good of another, God can bring resurrection. Our call is to love, not to push ourselves forward by imagining that winning is the path to a better world. We can lose, God can redeem. We are small, God is not. Holding the paradox of the way of death (literal and figurative) that brings real life (literal and eternal) requires faith.
So if the Africa half of our life can now speak back into the America half . . . I believe Africa would say, endure. Care for your family, your village, your locality. Face the big problems "one small life at a time"( Wendell Berry). And that connects our two continental foci. This year we are living back in a country where wealth and power too often trump justice and truth. The last 32 years we've lived in a place where survival of children and respect for ancestors drive sacrifice and hope. To all cultures, the love of God and of neighbor inspires us to fight cancer not people, to support schools not militias, to pray for strength to love not strength to succeed.
The good is breaking through, and mostly on the margins. So we live in hope.
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