We Died Before We Came Here: Book Review

I'm so thankful for friends giving me this book which I read in a couple of days, it was very absorbing. It tells the story of an American family who moved to a country in North Africa to tell people the good news of Jesus. It is a very thought-provoking book and gave me new ideas to think through. I was very challenged by their response to risk and danger and really identified with a lot of what Emily Foreman writesabout bringing up a family in a Middle Eastern context. I read the last chapters (telling of  the murder of Emily's husband) sitting in a park in Cambridge and sobbed throughout. I'm not sure what the other parents at the park thought of me!

Here are a few extracts:

A single light bulb in the lighting aisle at the hardware store makes very little impact, but the same bulb lit in a place of utter darkness makes a huge impact.

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I wondered if this is a helpful comment for thinking through the issues in the West as certain groups can have 'Enemy status' in our minds:

Ms are not the enemy. They are people held captive by the Enemy. Too often we as Christians are quick to shoot the hostage. But the Jesus we serve came to set the captives free, and he asks us to do the same.

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I know this feeling:

I had feared that after my kids got an updated taste of what they were "missing out on" in the US, they might not want to return. To my relief, they didn't seem to mind.

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I so agree:

Before we'd left the States, we'd been given some wise advice: "Let your kids be part of  your ministry life. Let it be their lives, too, as much as possible. When they're involved, they won't feel as though they're just along for your ride."

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We faced a lot of storms during our time in this country, both natural and metaphorical. You know that phrase "God will never give you more than you can handle"? It's not true. But do you know what is true? God will never give you more than  he can handle.

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This is taken from a message Stephen Foreman gave at a gathering in the US (he was killed a few months later):

When James Calvert went out as a missionary to the cannibals of the Fiji islands, the ship captain tried to turn him back, saying, "You'll lose your life and the lives of those with you if you go among those savages." To that Calvert replied, "We died before we came here." That's my question for us again tonight. Are you dead yet? Dead to yourself, dead to your own desires, dead to fear? Are we alive in Christ? My desire is that when people see your life, when they see my life, they will see Christ, and Christ alone. Let us live our lives as if they weren't our own lives. To truly be strangers in this world. To be aliens in this world. Our citizenship is in heaven.