A Season of Faith & Mission in the Himalayas

As I ventured into Nepal for a recent ministry excursion, I took with me three ministry-related books about the region to devour on my plane rides. This missionary memoir by Naomi Reed covers 2 years of her Australian family’s fears and flight from Nepal’s social unrest in the early 2000s.

No Ordinary View was the most personal book of my small lot, the other titles being:

• The Cross in the Land of the Khukuri by Norma Kehrberg (2000) — about the history of Nepal and her first-generation believers
  
• God Spoke Tibetan by Allen Mayberly (2001) — about the epic 90-year story of the translation of the Tibetan Bible

Book Summary

Noami Reed and her husband moved their 3 boys (aged 2-8) back to serve with the International Nepal Fellowship (INF) as medical educators in a suburb of Kathmandu. As they sought to adjust to Nepali schools and adapt to Nepali life, they often battled the pains of cross-cultural living and the risks of raising kids on the mission field—but none of these was as threatening as the Maoist uprisings and the royal response that resulted in curfews, strikes, and major threats of violence.

This book struck home to me, because I occasionally visit nations experiencing unrest, and I too sometimes face similar unknowns and fears in the country where I am raising my family. For the sake of this review, then, I want to focus on just 2 secondary elements from the book: the struggle of raising M.K.s (missionary kids) and the power of a good memoir.

The Struggle of Raising M.K.s

What struck me most about this book was Reed’s emphasis on her children. Some might think that missionaries serve at the expense of the children, and while that may be true of some bad apples, it’s not true of most. Reed is a prime example of how, no matter what she did in-country, her constant thought was “how will this affect my kids.” My wife and I are the same.

Missionaries must live in the middle of a dangerously judgmental spectrum.

• On the one hand, some think we don’t care about our kids enough. After all, we irresponsibly moved them away from the grandparents to Timbuctoo, just so we could live some adventurous life like Indian Jones and ruin any hope they had for “a normal life.”
  
• On the other hand, some are ready to pounce whenever we make a decision (be it in finances, schooling, housing, or ministry change) for the sake of the kids. “Who are you serving, your children or God!?” they demand in both attitude and snide remarks, if not in so many words.

Kudos to Reed for placing on display her thoughts and fears about her children’s growth, education, safety, and future. She’s a real-life mother, not a Christian superhero that missionaries are often made out to be. While her struggles about education have been almost the exact opposite from ours, I loved reading through these passages about her kids’ schooling woes. I want to share this section at length to illustrate how Reed’s real-life experiences clashed with her internal conflicts:

He who watches over me also watches over our 8-year-old son. He who neither slumbers nor sleeps has his hand on our son. In the middle of a very strict Hindu school, in the middle of Hindu meditations, the Maker of heaven and earth teaches him truths that he can’t learn anywhere else. He gives our son the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that he will know that he is the Lord.

Towards the end of April, all the children at KUPS did extensive exams. Even the revising was extensive. Occasionally, if a child didn’t know the answer to the question, an arm was raised in physical punishment. The arm landed as a slap across the face. Stephen would come home with stories of punishment and with the fear that it would happen to him. He would also come home with two hours of homework each night and the fear of punishment if it wasn’t completed. One night he admitted to us that he was so worried about the punishment that he wasn’t sleeping at night. He also appeared to be retreating into himself, becoming more and more isolated by the language barrier and the worldview differences. Although the classes were in English, the children spoke in Nepali socially and in the break times. Stephen, not comfortable with using his Nepali, seemed to be becoming an observer of life at school rather than a participant.

I talked about it with Darren after Stephen had gone to bed that night. The reason that we had encouraged him to try Nepali school was to give him the social contacts that we thought would be good for him. We thought that a positive time in another culture involved making friends from that culture and we thought that attending a local school would be the best place for Stephen to do that. The thoughts were good, we acknowledged late that night, but we also acknowledged that it wasn’t working. For me, the hardest thing was to realise that it was OK to make a decision and then, some months later, go back on that very decision; in fact, to turn around and do the exact opposite. But the more we talked about it that night, the more we realised that we needed to pull Stephen out of Nepali school and begin home-school. Indeed, it seemed so clear to us, that we didn’t even need a timeline or a plan of action. So in the morning, the first thing we did was to tell Stephen. (31-32)

In my own notes for this section, I wrote about the educational trials we’re going through currently, saying in part, “Ugh! It’s so, so, so difficult!”

The next time you’re tempted to think your missionary’s living the easy life—because they live on an island or near the mountains or within range of some great World Heritage Site—please know they’re not! Such international settings might be beautiful for a time, but they fade—usually into the harsh realities of culture, conflict, and the fact that this world is still Satan’s domain. The next time you’re tempted to think that way, pray for your missionary!

The Power of a Good Memoir

I don’t often read memoirs. Snippets of someone’s life—especially of someone still living who hasn’t had time to process all that’s transpired—don’t generally appeal to me. One such memoir that, however, was Val Kilmer’s I’m Your Huckleberry. But that doesn’t happen too often.

Naomi Reed wrote this memoir not so much about her missionary life, but more about her family’s sudden exit from the field due to civil unrest. Even though they had planned to leave the country “in six months”—and cutely started naming all the things they’d miss about Nepal, including homeschool (Chapter 10)—their plans were thwarted when the Maoist strikes lead to curfews, royals threats, and a promised clash of violence and revolution. It’s a compelling story that makes the final chapters whizz by in a flurry of activity and terror, and it made me consider my own life and ministry.

I’ve lived a fairly exciting, intrepid life, and we’ve experienced some major ups and downs in ministry. Yet I had to write in my notes at one point while reading this book: “She has a lot more dangerous stories to tell than I ever will have. I don’t think our adventures would be all that thrilling as a memoir.”

But as I look back on it now, I have to disagree…with myself. While the events of this book are dangerously exciting, they’re not the only element in missionary memoirs that have held my attention. I think of books like Beneath the Ancient Dust by Melissa Meyers (Afghanistan) or By Searching by Isabella Kuhn (China), books by women who have served the Lord in difficult places, yet who have not faced the same physical dangers we’d generally associate with their fields of service. Though the threat of physical harm was not generally present in their stories, their thoughts and experiences still inspire me. They inspire me to trust, to know that the Lord is good, and to push on.

I might not have a series of horror stories to share from the mission field or anecdotes of escape, but I do serve a mighty God on the mission field, and someday someone might want to read about it. The key I’m finding to a good memoir is not so much the edge-of-your-seat excitement, but rather the connection it makes with the reader. It’s an insight worth remembering!

Conclusion

Although I would not normally have ever come across this book, I’m glad I did for my trip to Nepal. It helped flavor Kathmandu for me, and it more importantly gave me a boots-on-the-ground look at the grittiness of 2006. It reminded me of a far less violent version of No Escape (2015) starring Owen Wilson—yet still terrifyingly real.

It has its devotional moments (i.e. p.11-13, p.77, p.101) but isn’t quite your average ministry saga. Still, it’s worth a read for anyone interested in Nepali history or ministry. I recommend it.

©2025 E.T.