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October 2007 
Everything you've got
Posted on Oct 2nd, 2007
by 
amabassadorforchange
amabassadorforchange
My parents are missionaries in France, they've been there 24 years now. To me, it's not just about sharing your faith, but also, and probably more importantly, sharing your values. If people could just get their values in the right place, it would be a lot easier to change the world: if socitety valued giving rather than getting, we'd all be better off. But I'm getting off topic.
France is, in my opinion, at a very bizarre stage were they're excessively post-modern, and have been so since the Revolution of 1789. By this I mean that they have no set values. Not that I have a problem with everyone choosing what they value but from what I can tell of my experience, they don't value much. They take Sartre's phrase "we are condemned to live" a little too literally.
Alain, a French atheist philosopher said that the Christian values of faith, hope and charity are the greatest human vertues. It is rather ironic in my mind that a Frenchman said that, and yet those are three things that lack in French society. In the 18 years in France, it was not the few conversions I saw that struck me, but the people who, in remaining atheist, changed their values through their contact with my parents. It was stunning.
Today I was in my Christianity and Culture class and the professor was talking about how missionaries used to give up everything they owned, all contact with their homelands and left to be missionaries to the New Word. And then he asked us if any of us knew anyone who had done that. We've been over my story a little, he didn't even give me time to register the question and raise my hand, he looked right at me and said "Your parents are doing that, aren't they?"
I simply nodded and my pen stopped mid-sentence as he went on to something else. It suddenly dawned on me that that was exactly what my parents had done. They had given upi everything they had and knew for something they believed in. I realized they would stick to that to the very end. "They're going to die there" I thought to myself. And as much as part of that frightened me, probably the part of it that I was thinking of their deaths, another told me that it was what I needed to do: give everything I have to what I believe in, to what I value.
France is, in my opinion, at a very bizarre stage were they're excessively post-modern, and have been so since the Revolution of 1789. By this I mean that they have no set values. Not that I have a problem with everyone choosing what they value but from what I can tell of my experience, they don't value much. They take Sartre's phrase "we are condemned to live" a little too literally.
Alain, a French atheist philosopher said that the Christian values of faith, hope and charity are the greatest human vertues. It is rather ironic in my mind that a Frenchman said that, and yet those are three things that lack in French society. In the 18 years in France, it was not the few conversions I saw that struck me, but the people who, in remaining atheist, changed their values through their contact with my parents. It was stunning.
Today I was in my Christianity and Culture class and the professor was talking about how missionaries used to give up everything they owned, all contact with their homelands and left to be missionaries to the New Word. And then he asked us if any of us knew anyone who had done that. We've been over my story a little, he didn't even give me time to register the question and raise my hand, he looked right at me and said "Your parents are doing that, aren't they?"
I simply nodded and my pen stopped mid-sentence as he went on to something else. It suddenly dawned on me that that was exactly what my parents had done. They had given upi everything they had and knew for something they believed in. I realized they would stick to that to the very end. "They're going to die there" I thought to myself. And as much as part of that frightened me, probably the part of it that I was thinking of their deaths, another told me that it was what I needed to do: give everything I have to what I believe in, to what I value.
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