Crazy for God by Frank Schaeffer

once, Mom stayed with us. I was eating my weight in the cereals we couldn’t get in Switzerland and drinking A&W root beer. And I was watching TV! I saw The Lone Ranger and other programs that had been described to me by American children visiting L’Abri.
    It was on that trip that I got a first inkling that our family was pitied by other people. I learned that Dr. Ferguson, “who is not even saved but has a real heart for the Lord’s work,” donated my operation when he found out Mom and Dad were missionaries. I felt embarrassed.
    It was the first time I had met people who said they were believers who had nothing to do with L’Abri. I went along with Dad on several speaking trips to local churches. I was very aware that somehow we weren’t like “them.” They had
ordinary jobs and then were Christians as an added bonus, whereas Christianity was all we did. And I would watch how people in “ordinary churches,” as Mom called them, related to us and we to them.
    I was discovering that we were second-class citizens, some sort of family of beggars. At the same time, from that visit on, I became more and more aware that we were also snobs. I sensed the frosty distance that separated my parents’ idea of themselves from “these ordinary American Christians.” Unlike them, my parents were aware of culture, good art, and good music. Where these Christians sang hymns that sounded tragically like trashy music, my parents played Bach. We vacationed in Italy, whereas “most of these poor dear simple American Christians don’t have your background and have not even been to Europe!”
    We took a day trip to New York City and spent the day at the Guggenheim Museum, where—to the horror of the guards—I free-wheeled my wheelchair down the winding ramp. On another day, I was taken to Radio City and loved watching the production of sound effects for a radio drama.
    It was an odd mix. We were beggars and yet looked down on the culture and the people who made our life possible. They pitied us, donated a place to stay and a free operation, and talked about how hard it must be to “leave home” and “go back to the mission field.” And we pitied their narrow existence and compared the genteel sophistication of Switzerland favorably to these “simple American Christians.” Sometimes Mom would say “They don’t even have real tea rooms here!”
    The overall feeling was that we were somehow displaced aristocrats, former royalty reduced to being dependent on less-cultured strangers, grateful yet resentful, sorry for ourselves
for the sacrifices we were making for a higher cause, yet envious of those people who could lead normal lives and who owned things, got to eat Grape-Nuts every day, watched TV, and made money from everyday jobs where you were paid instead of waiting for a series of miracles.
    We were proud that we were different from other people yet craved acceptance. And we craved this not just for ourselves, but for the Lord that we were living our lives for. Because when people accepted and helped us, when they admitted that we were living lives full of meaning and spiritual purpose that they, too, craved, when they complimented Mom on her clothes and said they didn’t know any other Christians who were so stylish, or so smart, or so kind, then we had done our job and had witnessed well for our Lord. But there was also an unintended message that I picked up, which has shaped my life: we were outsiders doing everything we could to be mistaken for insiders, so that we could be accepted by the insiders and then convert them to being outsiders, like us, until everyone became an outsider and therefore we got to be insiders forever!
    We wanted nothing so much as the respect of the people who found our ideas backward and foolish. In a fantasy world of perfect outcomes, you would write a “Christian book” but have the New York Times declare it great literature, so great that the reviewer would say he was converting. And