Recognizing Our Need for Rebirth

In the fall of 2003, my father wrote me a letter shortly after I had embarked on a two-year church mission to eastern Ukraine. "I've got to get used to the fact that you won't be the same guy when you return," he wrote. Now, of course, I was, in a purely metaphysical sense, still me when I came home. But my father understood something more of life. He knew that my experiences in Ukraine -- learning Russian, navigating a post-Soviet culture, having vanilla Coke sprayed on me by a group of unruly youths critical of America -- were designed to transform me at the soul level. Missionaries are sent forth to serve -- and, in the process, to become something different, something better.