RUN LIKE A CHAMPION

Family Life – 4
Sammy Tippit: As we’ve had these talks and these conversations about family life, one of the things we keep coming back to is the idea of communication. When I think of God’s love, I think of how God loved us so much that he didn’t just say, “Hey, I love you,” but he demonstrated that love by Jesus’ coming to the earth and showing us.

He communicated that love through the demonstration of Christ’s life. So communication is so important to a relationship. It’s important to our relationship with God and our relationships with one another, so I want us to begin to explore communication. Now we’re going to start off in this discussion…
We’ll go for a while here on several sessions, but I know you guys, Dave and Kelly, have taken a trip around the world. It must have had incredible challenges for communication, from making the decision to go to doing things once you were over there and being in situations that were difficult and all. First of all, just tell us what you did and why you did it.
Dave Tippit: Yeah. Well, everything just happened to align perfectly, and God opened up the doors for us to do this. We took a nine-month trip to 22 different countries and traveled as a family. We took a year off, rented out our house, pulled our kids out of school, and had them homeschooled, and for that year we went around doing a combination of ministry and some adventure of seeing just this beautiful world God has created.
There were a lot of reasons that we went and decided to go on this trip. One reason was that I think anything from your own childhood that you really value and treasure… It’s just natural that you want to pass that along to your children as a parent. Part of my childhood, as y’all know, was that I was traveling most summers to international countries.
God shaped the lens I see life through to be a global lens and helped me to see the panorama of his glory displayed throughout the various cultures of the world. That was a deep desire I had for my own kids. On this trip, I felt like there were a lot of ancillary things and effects that happened in their lives. “To whom much has been given, much is required.”
It’s not having a mentality that I expect something, that I have to have something. Going into these other cultures helps to broaden the kids’ horizons and helps them see they have been given a lot, so there is a lot that’s required of them. But the bottom line from my perspective was that I wanted my kids to be able to see through this global lens.
I wanted them to see all of these different cultures, to understand that the greatest education you can receive in life, from my perspective, is to travel, meet new people, and be in different places. It takes you out of your comfort zone, and you learn new things. Just really quickly… The ancient rabbis within the Jewish Torah used to have this saying that there were 70 different angles to understanding one passage of Scripture.  That’s why you have the Talmud and all of these historical documents in Judaism to this day. It’s because there are so many different interpretations of what the Scriptures mean. It’s so rich. It’s so full. None of us will ever have the full understanding of who God is, even through his Word. I just feel like that’s a good way to see life too.
There are so many different angles to life. There are so many different perspectives, and God can broaden our world. Rather than letting their world shrink and thinking, “Oh, I live here in the United States, here in the little town of Boerne, Texas. This is the way it’s supposed to be done…” They see it done in all different ways. I think God planted seeds within them to change as a result.
Sammy: I’m sure, Kelly, that whenever Dave shared that with you, you said, “All right! Let’s go!”
Kelly: “Good idea! Let’s go!” Yes. I thought it was the craziest thing I’d ever heard of. Just saying it sounds like, “Oh, cool. Let’s go travel the world,” but I’m so practical that I immediately start thinking, “We have to feed these kids three times a day. Where are we going to stay? How am I going to homeschool them? We’ll be together 24/7. Does that sound fun?”
All of those things just started coming to my mind, and I just thought, “Wow. I don’t know that we can actually do this.” But the more I prayed about it and the more I just kind of thought through it, the more I kept feeling like this was a gift of time that God was giving us. We were just kind of out of whack with our lives.
The kids were at the age where they were all going in different directions, and our evenings were crazy. I was like, “This is a time when we really can just have time to experience things together and just enjoy life at a slower pace.” Because of that and because I realized, “Man, when we get back from this trip, Taylor will be in 9th grade. I’ll have four more years with her…”  When they were little, I felt like they would be little forever, but once they hit school, it just kind of flew by. It’s still just flying by. So I thought, “This could be one year when we could really just slow down and enjoy one another.” I’m glad we did it. There were lots of ups and downs, and it was crazy at times, but overall we look back and are thankful we did it.
Sammy: I’m sure y’all had a lot of long talks about this, and I’m sure you prayed separately, together, and all of that to try to find out and make sure it was what you were supposed to do.
Kelly: Yeah.
Sammy: Okay, so you did this. You decided to do this. One of the first stops you had was Liberia.
Dave: Yeah.
Sammy: Tell us what happened in Liberia when you got there.
Dave: Well, we got there, and we were there for two weeks. The first week we were there, there had been this Ebola outbreak, but it hadn’t really spread at the rate it ended up spreading, so we had another team from America who came in and met us. When they arrived, the Ebola outbreak was starting to make international news. Several Westerners had passed away as a result.
During that next week, airline flights were cancelled. The government was trying to put in all of these precautions to keep people from getting the Ebola. It was really the beginning of the spread of the Ebola virus within that country of Liberia, so that first week, we didn’t have a TV or anything. We were living with Liberians, having a good time, and just doing our ministry thing.
Then that next week, it totally changed. They shut down public meetings. I remember that the day before they did that, we had these things called Scholarship kids’ camps (kind of like Vacation Bible School) that we were doing. They hadn’t shut it down, but they asked us, “Is it safe to bring the kids?” We had to bring our own kids in, and they had to pray and decide whether they wanted to go to the camp or not.
It was just a really good test of faith, a reality check, for our own kids to not just see something on TV but experience it and be put in someone else’s shoes. They experienced what these African kids experience every day. Then also, to have to trust God in the middle of it… It started off really tumultuously, but even in the middle of that, there was just a peace with everyone who was there and involved, even our Liberian friends. You could just tell God’s presence was with us during that time.
Sammy: I can tell you it was a test for the kids’ grandparents.
Tex: Not the kids, just the grandparents.
Kelly: Yeah. We got a few emails.
Sammy: We were praying for you guys.
Tex: We were for it.
Sammy: Tell me what this whole trip… If you could just summon up what you learned about communicating with each other on the trip, what would you say?
Dave: Like Kelly said, we were together 24/7. We were in tight spaces. I realize we’re Americans, so we have the luxury of having other spaces we can go to, but I think that no matter what culture you come from, it’s important to have that individual space and that individual time. In order for good communication to happen when you’re together, you have to be filled up with your relationship with God, with having quiet and peace.  We found that was essential, so we had to create those spaces even though we didn’t have those at times when we were staying in one- or two-bedroom apartments or whatever. The other thing I would just say is that when we went to Israel, it really made an impact on us how the whole culture practiced the Sabbath. Having rhythms of life is very important.
It’s very important to the Jewish people. Everyone would say, “In order to do, we have to first become. The Sabbath is becoming, and the rest of the week is doing.” You need that rhythm of life where you have just time away to appreciate who God is and who your spouse is, and then you can come back together, and in those times your communication will be that much richer.
Sammy: Well, I can imagine that when traveling (we traveled), it is a real challenge to be able to find a place and time to do that when you’re just surrounded by everybody else. That’s really critical, and it’s a part of what I really believe being a follower of Christ is all about. It’s being filled up so you can give out. I want to encourage you to develop your communication by developing your time alone with God, your time with him, so you can communicate adequately and lovingly with those who are closest to you and mean so much to you.