Of War & Wallpaper: Part 2

Grief Upon Grief

The Walkers landed in Western Europe in a heap of luggage and emotions. A ministry leader picked them up at the airport and hosted them in his home for their first week. Other missionaries pitched in to help as well. One family invited Lisa over to do laundry every week. Others helped them rent a tiny, two-room apartment and loaned them furniture and dishes. James and Lisa anticipated a transition period of about six months, which was all they could afford. The financial support they had raised met their needs in the former Soviet Union, but Western Europe was significantly more expensive.

Little Daniel had been droopy through the whole transition, so when they moved into their apartment, Lisa decided to cook one of his Moigorod favorites—a stuffed pasta dish—to cheer him up. As she puts it, “You don’t like to see depressed three-year-olds.” That reminder of home brought out all the accumulated emotions of the past several weeks. Daniel sat on the living room floor pushing his one Thomas train around and around the little circle of track, sobbing.

James and Lisa tried to comfort him, but they were struggling too. Even before the deportation, Lisa had already been grieving the loss of her mother, who died earlier that year. And then, just weeks after arriving in Europe, the Walkers saw Moigorod in the news and learned that one of the women from Lisa’s English club was killed, along with her children, in a house fire. Grief piled on top of grief.

James doesn’t remember questioning whether their time in Moigorod had been wasted, but Lisa often wondered, What were those five years of my life for? She didn’t think of it as a bad experience. Despite the inconveniences and surveillance, she missed Moigorod. But she wondered, What was God’s purpose? When people checked in on Lisa, she told them, “I don’t know how I’m doing, but I know that God is good.”

One friend pushed back a little, “Is that what you really feel, or are you just saying it?”

So, she was honest. “I’m just saying it! My feelings are too much, so all I can do is repeat the truth I know.”

James says faith was a choice during that season of uncertainty. “We decided, God is good. We’ll make it through this.”

Facts and Fictions

A big part of “making it through this” was figuring out what would come next. The Walkers hoped to resettle in a European or former Soviet context rather than start over in a completely new culture. Since Daniel had developed asthma like his dad, they needed to be in a place with relatively clean air and a good level of medical care.

Just a few days after they arrived from Moigorod, the Walkers’ area leader pulled out a map of Europe and explained where other teams were based, what sort of ministries they engaged in and where he would like to see new teams form. About six weeks later, James and Lisa started taking survey trips to potential locations. None of them seemed like a good fit. The Walkers narrowed their list to two options that felt possible, but still not quite right—one in the Balkans and one in Central Europe. Neither country was Russian-speaking, and neither had a Pioneers team.

Logically, the Balkan country had more needs. There were fewer missionaries, fewer believers and significant problems within the existing church leadership. The work there felt both compelling and daunting. The second option, in Central Europe, had all the emotional appeal. James had family heritage there and Lisa had always been drawn to it. They connected well with missionaries from other organizations. But during their visit, the air pollution triggered asthma attacks for both James and Daniel and the Walkers thought, We can’t live in a place where we can’t breathe.

James resigned himself to serving in the statistically needier country with better air. While he wrote a newsletter at the Pioneers Europe office to announce their decision to go to the Balkans, Lisa called her sister Janet, who lived in Europe, to explain their thought process. Lisa admitted they were making the decision based on the numbers. Janet responded that their Central European option also had a massive spiritual need, even if the statistics were not as bleak as those for the Balkans. She also pointed out that they had visited an industrial region of Central Europe. That explained the poor air quality. There were plenty of other cities where James and Daniel would be able to breathe freely.

With those significant but somewhat surface arguments against Central Europe set aside, Lisa finally grappled with the underlying reason they were hesitant to go there: It felt too nice. Life in Central Europe didn’t seem hard enough to be a real ministry, and it would be significantly more expensive than Moigorod. Janet responded bluntly, “That’s a really dumb reason not to go somewhere. If the Lord is calling you there, He’ll help you raise the financial support you need.”

So, Lisa called James at the office and told him, “You can go to the Balkans, but I’m going to Central Europe.” She meant it light-heartedly—sort of—but the truth was, both James and Lisa wanted to move to Central Europe. “You can’t really say you love a place when you’ve only visited it once,” Lisa admits, “But we felt the beginning of that in our hearts. We hadn’t felt that way about the other country. We were just looking at facts and figures.” They talked through it again, and Lisa persuaded James. He deleted the word “Balkans” from the newsletter, replaced it with “Central Europe,” and clicked “Send.”

Missions 2.0

The Walkers would be the first Pioneers missionaries in their new context, but they didn’t feel alone. Experienced workers from other organizations offered direction and support. And for James, starting something new was attractive. They had essentially started a new team in Moigorod and had enjoyed it.

The finances of permanently relocating to Europe still felt like a huge obstacle, but the Lord provided just as Janet had assured them He would. The Walkers’ sending church contributed an extra $10,000, which allowed them to furnish their new home. Friends joined their financial support team and others increased their giving. “I can’t say it was easy,” James reflects, “but the Lord provided what we needed to make the move.”

Lisa remembers an overall feeling of hopefulness. “I think the Lord helped me be ready for the challenge. He put in my heart a sense of adventure once again. A lot of people, if they thought they were going to have to learn another language, would feel discouraged. But for me, it was more like, Wow, I can learn this one better, maybe more systematically. I guess we get a 2.0. And I felt less scared than when we went to Moigorod.” We’ve done it once, we can do it again, the Walkers reasoned, and not in a self-sufficient sense. They just felt the Lord was going to help them through the transition. They were right.

Dreams and Doubts

Lisa describes language learning in Central Europe as a dream. “We just signed up, and there we were in a class!” James wasn’t quite as excited about starting over in a new language, but he was grateful that the university had a formal program and that the language shared Slavic roots and some general grammatical framework with Russian. For extra language practice, the Walkers hired a private tutor. She found it hilarious to hear Americans speak her language with a Russian accent.

When James and Lisa were practicing expressing likes and dislikes, their tutor asked, “What do you not like about living here?” They responded with blank looks. “No really,” she urged, “Tell me. I can take it.” But James and Lisa couldn’t come up with a single negative thing to say. They tried to explain, in their limited vocabulary, that they had come from living in a tiny Soviet apartment under constant surveillance to a beautiful home in a free society, and they honestly loved everything about it.

The Central European lifestyle they had feared would be “too nice” turned out to be a blessing. They had rented a spacious house with a fenced-in yard. Their city had grocery stores where you pushed a cart down the aisle and filled it with the things you wanted. No more reading an abacus upside-down! Daniel happily attended a preschool run by a Christian family, where he made friends and started picking up the language. James found the relative modernity of their new town calming. “We could even go to McDonald’s if we wanted to.”

When Lisa looks back on that first year in Central Europe, she describes it as “this cushion of feeling delighted that had an underside to it. I almost felt survivor’s guilt. Like maybe I wasn’t as much of a missionary anymore.” It didn’t help that some friends from Moigorod visited them and immediately concluded, “Oh I see—now you’re going to have a ministry among rich people.”

The Walkers also began to feel a disconnect with the other missionaries in the area. “Our experiences were so different from theirs, it almost felt like we didn’t speak the same language. We would worry about getting kicked out and they would look at us like, What? That doesn’t happen.” But it had happened to the Walkers, and the effects lingered. In some ways, they still lived like they were under surveillance, always anticipating a knock at the door and a police officer outside to question them.

James explains, “It’s not paranoia if people are actually out to get you. We were coming out of a situation in Moigorod where people became our friends simply to report on us. When we moved to Central Europe, we were still carrying that mentality with us and had to recalibrate.” James and Lisa didn’t notice the effect until a local pastor commented, “We hope that someday you are able to relax and trust us.” They didn’t mean to be distant or suspicious, but their cautious attitude showed.

The Walkers felt somewhat safer after their neighbor shared that when they first moved into their house, the police had called her with questions about them. “I don’t have to answer any of this,” she had told them, “Go away!” And that was the end of it. A civilian could never have responded to the authorities like that in Moigorod. Slowly, it began to sink in for James and Lisa. We’re okay. No one is going to come and kick us out.

Okay to Not Be Okay

In early 2003, after a year in Central Europe, the Walkers decided to make a trip back to the U.S. to visit their families and the prayer and financial supporters who undergirded their ministry. It was already hard to leave their new home. James and Lisa were getting to know people. Their local church invited them to work with the youth group, which they loved. The kids were doing well. But they felt it was time to go back and thank everyone for so generously supporting them through the transition.

The Walkers borrowed a Ford Fiesta and drove through 17 states with two toddlers, staying a night or two at a time on friends’ couches along the way, eating fast food and drinking too much caffeine. “It was an insane trip,” James admits. Eventually, they made their way to Florida for some vacation time with Lisa’s family.

Just as they started to settle in and relax, Lisa woke up in the middle of the night thinking she was having a heart attack. James raced her to the ER, but it turned out to be a false alarm. Lisa managed to get a little sleep in the early morning hours, but she woke up to a seemingly endless series of anxiety attacks. “They were like waves, and they wouldn’t stop. I would get maybe a five-minute interval before the next one just crashed over me.” Everything in the room grew distant like an out-of-body experience and blood pounded in her ears. She couldn’t even read her Bible for comfort. “I could look at words, but my brain wasn’t capable of deciphering them.”

Lisa had never suffered from anxiety before. She called a counselor who specialized in missionary care and was able to meet with him that afternoon. The first thing she said was, “Please don’t make me stay in Florida. That would be the worst thing for me. I’ll do anything. Just let me go home.” By home, she meant Central Europe.

The onset of the anxiety attacks at the end of a really good year seemed bizarre to Lisa at first. The counselor helped her understand that the accumulated trauma of the previous two years—the death of her mom, the grief of their abrupt departure from Moigorod, news of house fire deaths right afterward, the prolonged uncertainty of the transition, and the stress of a new language and culture—had all finally built up and overwhelmed her. Lisa explains, “I had pushed all the sadness aside because I needed to get where we were going next. I couldn’t begin to think about it, so I didn’t. Now I had to. I tend to power through stress, but my body decided for me that I couldn’t do it anymore.”

To Lisa’s enormous relief, the counselor was willing to help her build a care plan she could implement in Central Europe, where she felt settled and at home. Her recovery included medication, rest, exercise, diet changes and regular check-ins with the counselor and a medical doctor. At home in Central Europe, Lisa could fix healthy meals in her own kitchen and put the kids down for naps in their own beds. After about nine months, she started to feel like herself again. Looking back at that period, Lisa reflects, “I came to understand that even though the ending was okay, we had still experienced a trauma. The Lord was good to us, and He provided. But it was still okay to say, I’m exhausted.”

Ready and Willing

The Walkers continued to deepen their roots and their ministry in Central Europe for the next two decades. They worked alongside local churches, discipling believers and sharing their faith. They encouraged the vastly outnumbered Christians to reach out to their neighbors and helped them study God’s Word. James and Lisa found the work rewarding and fulfilling, but also challenging. At one point, their local church went through a particularly difficult season and the Walkers felt overwhelmed as they tried to help members heal from hurt, anger and a sense of betrayal. “It was ugly,” James remembers. The Walkers shared the challenging situation with a visiting missionary.

“You know what you need?” he told them. “You need to go to a place where you can be successful.”

James and Lisa sat around the kitchen table long after he left and considered his advice. In the end, they decided, “That’s not what we want. We don’t want to be successful. We want to be where God wants us.”

Once they were well-established in their town and ministry, James and Lisa were asked to take on a leadership role within Pioneers. They would oversee missionary teams in six European countries. It was a very different role than James, in particular, had pictured for himself. His understanding of what God wants from him has changed since he first went to the mission field in 1995. “In my mind back then, I was a teacher, a youth worker, a discipler kind of person. I was willing to go anywhere to do those things. Much of our ministry in Moigorod and here in Central Europe matched that. I can’t say where along the line the transition began, but God showed me I’m called to serve Him wherever He sends me and do whatever He asks me to do, regardless of whether or not it fits who I think I am.”

And for the foreseeable future, God seems to want the Walkers to stay in Central Europe. Every two years, they used to renew their residency permit. In 2014, as they began the familiar process, an immigration officer suggested that if they wanted to stay long-term, they should apply for citizenship. Instead of the typical long, expensive immigration process, he recommended that they apply directly to the country’s president. “Write him about why you want to be citizens,” he told James and Lisa. “He can accept or deny you. It won’t cost anything except the stamps.”

So, the Walkers gathered documentation of why they wanted to be dual citizens of the U.S. and their adopted country. James included a seven-generation family ancestry chart tracing his heritage to Central Europe. Friends, neighbors and the kids’ teachers wrote letters in support of their application. The town mayor provided a formal reference embossed with a gold stamp. “They were rooting for us,” Lisa explains. “They had seen our children grow up. In some ways that town is our hometown, as much as anywhere has ever felt like a hometown to me.”

A few months later, Lisa burst into tears of joy and relief when a government official informed her over the phone that all four of them had been granted citizenship by the president himself. The Walkers might have a reason to leave Central Europe someday, but they can’t get kicked out, ever. Daniel and Brittany eventually moved back to the U.S. for college, but they still consider a small town in Central Europe their hometown.

“We aren’t the best missionaries ever,” James admits. “We are probably near the bottom level, not the higher end. We’re doing the best we can with what God has given us to do. The one thing that has kept us here until now and will always keep us is a sense of, God, You called us here, so we will do what You give us to do.”

Early in the morning on February 24th, 2022, God gave the Walkers something new to do for Him.