If you had lived all over the world, traveled and seen a dozen cultures in your childhood and early adult years, what would be your anchor, your home? Perhaps a home, although you might not live in it for long before being uprooted? How about friends you could be with for a few years, before once again moving? Your livelihood? Your family? Don’t be surprised if meeting Chris Christensen gives you the answer he found for himself, a discovery his song words in “More Than Anything” suggest he made and recorded for the rest of us. See what he says. Where do you think his mind goes when he thinks of ‘Home’ (see the picture of where he might, if you know his story) ?
It was 1989, and Chris Christensen at 32 years old had already probably grown used to radical changes in scenery. He was born in Philadelphia, but raised in South Africa by missionary parents and grandparents, a missionary-life, even while still in diapers, that imparted to him a lifestyle that he has carried into adulthood. He went back to the U.S. to study at Wheaton College in Illinois, and then moved with his wife Laura and family to Belgium in 1987. Along the way, he learned guitar and developed his gift for music, a global language that in tandem with his missionary background he eventually put to use. You get a hint of what he felt two years after arriving in Belgium in “More Than Anything”, something very simply stated, but a message that probably resonated with the people who he’d known up until that time. Africa – what would be important there? Maybe one hears a little bit of his missionary parents’ and grandparents’ experience – as well as his own -- in the song’s lyrics. Nothing matters more than the love of Jesus, a theme that speaks to a Third World. Not wealth, not even life matters the way Jesus’ care for me does. Chris and Laura have been all over the world with the message, on four different continents with a ministry they call ‘Exo’, reaching French-speaking peoples with its straightforward, genuine truth. It doesn’t matter if you’re in North America, Africa, Asia, or Europe, the south Pacific, or the Caribbean basin. Jesus is a rock, a stable foundation. He works in any culture.
God’s value must become apparent the more of His creation we see. A missionary has this advantage over the rest of us. Everywhere there’s someone who needs to overcome life, whether it be Third World poverty, decadent wealth and selfishness in the West, or disease that afflicts everyone despite socioeconomic status. All of us can see Him. Christensen’s missionary reminder communicates all over, but also even if I’ve never set foot outside of my hometown. Where does your mind go when you think of ‘home’? Where does a missionary’s mind go? Does it matter? One day, we’ll all be in the same home.
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