A number of years ago when I was in graduate school at Notre Dame, I answered the doorbell and discovered four Asian young adults on my doorstep.  They told me they were from Indonesia.  Three of them were about to start college at Purdue.  The fourth, a young woman, was about to start at Notre Dame.  The problem was that the dorms would not open for another week and she had no place to stay.  Her companions were going to head back to Purdue within the hour.  She had our name and address because my wife, Elisa, coordinated a program in our church for international students.  Could she possibly stay with us?

Well, now.

Many readers of this blog are probably kind, warm-hearted, compassionate people who would not hesitate to open their home to someone in need.  I, however, am not such a good person.  In unexpected and uncertain social situations, I freeze up and worry about what might go wrong.  I once took the MMPI psychological test and reviewed the bar-graph results with a psychologist who would help me interpret them.  One bar towered above the rest of the bars in the row, like the Eiffel Tower looming over old apartment buildings of Paris.  This particular bar measured Harm-Avoidance.  Interpretation:  I am a Big Chicken.  (The psychologist, who was a kind soul, did not use these exact words, but I could see what was what).

Anyway, that day in South Bend I found myself turning over a question I could not remember considering before:  What am I supposed to do with the Indonesians?  I invited the four students in and stalled in my response while I mentally whipped through my options.  Unfortunately, the situation seemed like some sort of New Testament parable.  As a Christian, I realized, I was probably supposed to warmly tell the young stranger she was welcome to stay with us and then carry her bags up to our guestroom.  But the Big Chicken in me provoked all sorts of worrisome possibilities.  Maybe she would teach my daughters to smoke pot.  Maybe she would rip our bedsheets, leave dirty dishes stacked in the sink and monopolize the TV.  Maybe she was going to invite her friends in at night for loud, exotic Indonesian college-student parties.  Maybe this whole thing was an elaborate plot to steal all the valuable electronics in our house (a computer and a VCR).  Maybe…. maybe…. well, the scenario I couldn’t imagine seemed the worst of all.

What to do?  It was important to discuss major decisions with Elisa, but she was not at home and the three Purdue students were about to leave.  I briefly considered eliciting advice from my daughters.  The oldest, Karin, was pretty sensible.  She was, however, entering the second grade.  No, I probably should not go that route.  I was on my own.  And so I decided:  yes, she could stay with us.

End of story:  The young woman stayed, the Purdue students left, Elisa came home a couple of hours later and because she is a better person than me, she immediately welcomed the young woman with warmth and compassion.  That stranger on our doorstep, Sari, stayed with us for about ten days and turned out to be an amazingly fun and delightful young woman.  Over the next couple of years, we invited her over to our house many times.  Sari became a good friend and proved to be a true blessing to everyone in the family.  In hindsight, I can only imagine the anxieties she had that day on the doorstep in South Bend, anxieties which rightfully would have been far, far greater than mine.

We would never have been blessed that way, however, if we had not been missionaries in Kenya for six years. First of all, Sari would never have had our name in her pocket if Elisa had not started the international student ministry at our church.  Elisa did this because we ourselves were once strangers in a different culture.  Grateful for how a veteran missionary couple, Jim and Joan Harding, welcomed us and eased our transition to a very different place, we thought it would be good to do something similar when we moved back to Indiana.  Second, missionaries are not necessarily instinctively more compassionate than others.  They are made up of the same stuff as ordinary Christians are.  But my missionary experience put me in places where I had to adjust to unexpected scenarios, where I had to consider the possibility that the Holy Spirit arranged surprising situations, and where I had to face my own flaws and limitations if I were going to do this missionary thing.  I began to see that sometimes I am called to find out whether or not the grace of God is bigger than the Big Chicken within.

But here is the take-away:  with the growth of world Christianity, many American Christians will find themselves in similarly unexpected situations in the decades to come.  In fact, many already have.