Growing up overseas as a missionary kid (MK) has become one of my greatest joys—deeply touching nearly every part of my adult life in profound ways. But like every coin, there’s a flipside. Getting to joy didn’t come quickly or easily. While I loved the adventures and the uniqueness of my globally mobile experiences, more often than not, being an MK felt like a job—one for which I was constantly receiving a poor performance review.

It seemed like a given that part of my job as an MK was to be a rockstar evangelist.

But, by age eight, I still had no converts. It wasn’t even until I was 14 that I actually walked someone through the gospel… and I felt severely behind.

Truthfully, I hadn’t even fully dedicated my life to Jesus until I was 14 myself! But see… that had to be a secret. No one could know that until that point, I wasn’t committed… I might have my MK title revoked—one of the few stable sources of my identity.

Another unspoken aspect of my internal job description was to hide my pain, because sharing the depths of it could impact not only my parents' livelihood, but also the lost souls we were there to save.

At age 10, I suffered from severe anxiety and depression. But I felt like if I told anyone, then my family was going to have to leave the field (because of me). Therefore, the people they would have shared the gospel with wouldn’t hear and instead would go to hell (because of me).

At age 15, on stateside assignment, I mastered the art of hiding my pain as we paraded around the country raising support.

Whenever someone asked how I liked being an MK, I felt like I was in a job interview, trying to prove my worth and value in having that title. But my constant feelings of failing at my perceived MK job description just caused these conversations to fuel me with shame.

It started with remarks and questions from well-meaning believers:

• “You’re such a great missionary kid!”
• “What does it feel like to have such incredible parents?”
• “How many people have you shared the gospel with? It must be so many!”
•  “What do you think this story in the Bible is saying? I don’t understand it, and I thought you might because you’re an MK.”

But simultaneously these questions and statements gave me a sense of pride. (In fact, 73% of MKs found a sense of purpose in being an MK!1) I felt like a mini-celebrity; people wanted my thoughts! And I’ll tell you, little Jessi LOVED that. For a long time, I loved feeling honored; I loved being on the pedestal.

Until I didn’t anymore.

Slowly… sneakily… and subconsciously these questions and remarks had raised the pressure I felt about the role I carried in being an MK to unreachable expectations.

Suddenly, when I was asked these questions that I couldn’t answer, I had the urge to lie. “I don’t know,” felt like an unacceptable answer. It felt like admitting that I was failing at my job. Surely, they would fire me if they knew.

So, I felt the pressure to always come up with something, because I felt a desperate need to defend my title as “good little missionary kid.”

The pedestal that once was my pride, became my cage, and I felt so alone in that cage on that pedestal. I looked over at other MKs on their pedestals, and it seemed like they had earned it:

They had more national friends…

… more personal stories of God’s faithfulness that were shared at church

… so much more Scripture memorized than I did.

They lived in a more rural or dangerous region and therefore had sacrificed more.

They weren’t as afraid as I was living in a foreign country and therefore must trust God more than I did.

But being on a pedestal makes it difficult to reach out to someone on their pedestal, because then yours might topple.

Little did I know that most of my MK friends had very similar internal struggles. TCK Training’s 2024 research found that 54% of MKs felt a pressure to be "perfect" (just like me!), 69% of MKs felt a pressure to "perform" when visiting their passport country (just like me!), and 29% of MKs worried that misbehavior would result in their family having to leave the country (just like me!).2

I wasn’t alone. I just felt like I was. And sometimes—when I voiced these fears and anxieties—I was even told that I was; that no one else felt these things. Because for them to acknowledge my pedestal was crumbling… might mean that theirs was too. Because if my fears were true... theirs might be also. Many of us were corroding from the inside out on our pedestals. Feeling like if we spoke up, the very vulnerable fears we had would prove true.

Of course, I didn’t realize this at first. At first, I became bitter about this shame.

I was angry about these pressures I felt, but I could never quite put my finger on where they came from. I mean, no one had said anything “mean,” right? So, maybe I was the problem, and I just needed to get over it. What if they were right? This is the job, and I’m not hitting my quotas.

But that also didn’t feel right. So, when I graduated high school and left the mission field at 18, I began unstacking these feelings. I took my bitterness, shame, anger, and grief (intertwined with the happiness, joy, hope, and purpose) to the feet of Jesus, and I said, “Please explain this to me! What am I supposed to do with this? Which pieces of these are you... and which ones are the world?”

I sought counsel—from both believers and unbelievers.

I went to therapy, and to seminary because I wanted to dig into Scripture to know what I believed about the problem of pain.

I wept with trusted friends. And I wept with friends who could not handle my pain and left.

I voiced questions to elders at my church who told me that the pressure and grief I felt were self-inflicted, and I needed to practice more contentment and joy. This seemed to only confirm my deepest fears that I wasn’t fulfilling my role as an MK, and that I was alone in that pressure.

I saw MK friends reject God due to the trauma they’d experienced at the hands of missionaries.

And I kept running to God about my sorrows and fears of my MK role and asking him, “Why?! Why did you make me an MK?

Why did you force this role and life of pain on me and so many other children?”

And somewhere along the way, while he never answered “why?” I heard him whispering, “I’m here. I see you. I know you. I love you. And it was never meant to be that way.”

He used those trusted friends who simply sat with me in my grief to weave compassion into my story.

As I dove into Psalms and Job, I learned God welcomed lament. He was just as heartbroken by my pain and the MK “pressure to be perfect” as I was, and he wanted to grieve with me.

I realized that Matthew 18:3 (“... unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”) had always seemed… inaccessible to me. How could I come to Jesus “like a child” if I had grown up so fast? I wasn’t even sure I knew how to be a child. After all, I had a job as an MK at the ripe young age of zero. And yet, Jesus felt this was important enough to pause his preaching (Matt 19:10)! Incredible.

So, in my early adult years, I fought to cultivate my childlike wonder, and I do mean I fought. Mostly against myself, but boy was it a fight. I fought against fears and shame and internal narratives. But I found healing in realizing that Jesus didn’t look down on me when I laughed so loud I snorted or when I would excitedly skip whenever I saw the mountains he’d made. I learned he wanted to be with me in my joy just as much as he did in my grief.

And here’s the thing about joy. It’s complicated. Being joyful does not mean that everything is easy or that I’m always “happy.” However, cultural narratives in the church sometimes imply that if we’re not “happy go lucky” all the time, then we don’t have the joy of the Lord and therefore are disobedient and ungrateful to God.

So, when I say that now “being an MK is my joy,” I am not saying that I look back on every part of my childhood fondly, or that I’m happy about the trauma I experienced, or that I’m grateful I observed people who claimed Christ to be an incredibly poor representation of him.

It is my joy because I’ve seen God’s faithfulness woven throughout so much of my story. I had a front-row seat to the mission field where I witnessed miracles. I got to experience redemption in my own life and in the lives of so many others. I don’t know a life in which I didn’t know the beautiful story of the gospel. That is a blessed privilege.

I can’t say, “I wouldn’t change my childhood for the world” ... because I would. There are so many things I wish I could change. Things I wish were different.

But mostly, I wish that the expectation of it being my job would have been combatted along the way. Because I’m confident that being an MK was the life the Lord laid out for me, not because it was my job—he never intended it to be that way—but because that is the life that caused my joy to be great with him now.