Tattoos Aren't Taboo
I think the one word people would use to describe my life is "unexpected." I don’t think that any of my friends -- or even myself for that matter -- could have predicted that I would end up living in a place like this: the Dao Valley in the jungle.
I grew up mostly in the suburbs of Los Angeles. My life revolved around skateboarding and good music.
Then my dad got a new job and we moved to the Tampa, Florida, area in my teens. That didn’t work out very well for me. Most of the locals thought I was a bit strange and I wasn’t too fond of most of them either. It wasn’t long before my highest aspiration in life was to make it back to Los Angeles as soon as possible.
By graduation, my passions were still skateboarding and music, but I made a slight adjustment to my highest goal in life. I decided that when I did get back to California, I would open a skatepark. Then I could not only make a living, but spend my time doing what I loved best and be in the only place I could ever call "home." Life would be awesome!
These ambitions weren’t exactly a reflection of the spiritual things my parents had taught me. I grew up going to church and watching my parents minister to people. I saw how they tried to keep the focus on eternal things. But somehow, it all never clicked with me. I didn’t realize that salvation was about Jesus and His work, not about me and mine.
But out of respect for my parents, I agreed to attend Bible college for a year. Things didn’t go well. I got into a lot of trouble, mouthed-off to superiors and was finally put on probation. I could only leave my dorm room for meals or classes. I gave myself homemade tattoos to pass the time.
Then one day in class, a Bible teacher said, "If you are trusting in anything at all to get you to Heaven in addition to Jesus Christ alone and His finished work on the cross on your behalf, then you are looking straight into the face of God and telling Him that what His Son Jesus did on the cross isn’t good enough. You are telling God that He might as well not have sent Jesus at all."
That statement absolutely blew me out of my seat. I knew I’d heard stuff like that before, but it just never clicked. Now I realized that it was all about Jesus, not me. I needed to trust in what Christ had done for me, not in anything I had done in hopes of gaining His approval.
At that point, God really got ahold of my life and I began to see things differently. While I still had the same passions, now I had the desire to use those passions for God’s glory. I honestly couldn’t shut up about Jesus.
A few of us Christian skaters started a Saturday morning Bible study. We sat around with our skateboards and Bibles, studying God’s Word together and talking about what He was teaching us. For the first time in my life, I began finding release and freedom in God, instead of just on a skateboard.
One night, a couple of us decided to go downtown to skate at a favorite set of stairs by an intersection. But we had to watch the traffic light carefully to not interfere with oncoming traffic.
When it was my turn to go, I took a quick glance to the traffic light on my left and since it was red, I jumped on my board. But while I was in mid-air above the stairs, the traffic light turned green. I landed in the street to the "screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech" of tires. The car bumper stopped literally inches from my kneecaps. My hands slammed on to the hood with a big thud! I looked up to see a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl staring at me, horrified, from behind the driver’s wheel.
She quickly pulled the car over and began asking frantically out of the car window, "Are you OK? Did I hit you? Are you hurt?" I didn’t have a scratch on me and thanked God for sparing my life. Then I realized this was the perfect opportunity to tell someone about eternal life. So I said to the girl, "I know where I would have gone if I had died. Do you know where you’re going?"
She looked at me with a huge smile and said, "Are you a Christian? I just got saved last week! And I don’t have any Christian friends at all!"
The next weekend she joined our Saturday morning Bible study group. God began transforming her the same way He had transformed me. We became good friends, but lost contact over the summer. It was a surprise to find each other at the same Bible college in the fall.
Then a representative from New Tribes Mission, Dunn Gordy, taught a class on tribal missions. He brought stacks of letters with him from tribal people begging for someone to come and teach them about the Bible. He copied the letters and handed them out in class.
I couldn’t believe what I was reading. The letters said things like "We want to know how to go to God’s good place after we die. We don’t want to go to the place of fire but we have no one to teach us. Please send someone quickly before too many more of us die!" One letter described the Good News of eternal life as "a big jar of sweet, delicious cookies" that we Americans and Westerners are "keeping all for ourselves because we don’t want to share."
Dunn Gordy said that while we were making our plans for our lives we also needed to consider what God would have us do with our lives.
But surely someone like me shouldn’t go to remote places like that, I rationalized. What about my passion for skateboarding? There’s no concrete in the jungle. Couldn’t I just start my skatepark in Los Angeles and talk to kids there about Jesus?
But I kept thinking about those letters. I couldn’t get it out of my head that any skateboarder in Los Angeles could just walk into a Walmart or a shopping mall and pick up the Bible and read about the message of eternal life. Or they could flip on the radio or TV and hear the truth.
The more I thought about it, the more it just didn’t seem right to skateboard my life away while entire people groups didn’t have any access to the Gospel.
The next day after class, I talked to Dun Gordy about it. "Do you really think that God could use me in tribal missions?" I asked him. "I’ve got a bunch of tattoos. What would the tribal people or other missionaries think of that? And I grew up in the suburbs. I don’t know the first thing about surviving in remote places."
He told me that tribal people have crazy tattoos too. He said that it didn’t matter what I looked like or where I came from, that God could use my life in tribal missions.
As it turned out, God was also working on that blonde-haired, blue-eyed friend of mine who had nearly run me over. We both decided there was nothing more we wanted to do with our lives than take the message of Jesus to people who hadn’t heard. We began joking with each other, "Hey, you could build your hut next to mine and we’ll work in the same tribe!" It was all downhill from there. Since we were best friends, had the same passions in life, and knew that building one hut was much more practical than building two, we got married.
Now nearly ten years later, my best friend and I are blessed to live in a remote jungles, bringing God’s message to the Dao people group. Jennie is the Bible translator and I am the Bible and literacy teacher. The friendships that we have forged here run deep. Neither Jennie nor I could ever be convinced that anything out there would be more fulfilling -- even running a skatepark in Los Angeles (although I do still pull out my skateboard whenever we go supply buying in the city).
Now the word I would use to describe my life is "privileged." It’s been a privilege to take the message of salvation to the Dao people and watch God transform their lives before our very eyes.
I grew up mostly in the suburbs of Los Angeles. My life revolved around skateboarding and good music.
Then my dad got a new job and we moved to the Tampa, Florida, area in my teens. That didn’t work out very well for me. Most of the locals thought I was a bit strange and I wasn’t too fond of most of them either. It wasn’t long before my highest aspiration in life was to make it back to Los Angeles as soon as possible.
By graduation, my passions were still skateboarding and music, but I made a slight adjustment to my highest goal in life. I decided that when I did get back to California, I would open a skatepark. Then I could not only make a living, but spend my time doing what I loved best and be in the only place I could ever call "home." Life would be awesome!
These ambitions weren’t exactly a reflection of the spiritual things my parents had taught me. I grew up going to church and watching my parents minister to people. I saw how they tried to keep the focus on eternal things. But somehow, it all never clicked with me. I didn’t realize that salvation was about Jesus and His work, not about me and mine.
But out of respect for my parents, I agreed to attend Bible college for a year. Things didn’t go well. I got into a lot of trouble, mouthed-off to superiors and was finally put on probation. I could only leave my dorm room for meals or classes. I gave myself homemade tattoos to pass the time.
Then one day in class, a Bible teacher said, "If you are trusting in anything at all to get you to Heaven in addition to Jesus Christ alone and His finished work on the cross on your behalf, then you are looking straight into the face of God and telling Him that what His Son Jesus did on the cross isn’t good enough. You are telling God that He might as well not have sent Jesus at all."
That statement absolutely blew me out of my seat. I knew I’d heard stuff like that before, but it just never clicked. Now I realized that it was all about Jesus, not me. I needed to trust in what Christ had done for me, not in anything I had done in hopes of gaining His approval.
At that point, God really got ahold of my life and I began to see things differently. While I still had the same passions, now I had the desire to use those passions for God’s glory. I honestly couldn’t shut up about Jesus.
A few of us Christian skaters started a Saturday morning Bible study. We sat around with our skateboards and Bibles, studying God’s Word together and talking about what He was teaching us. For the first time in my life, I began finding release and freedom in God, instead of just on a skateboard.
One night, a couple of us decided to go downtown to skate at a favorite set of stairs by an intersection. But we had to watch the traffic light carefully to not interfere with oncoming traffic.
When it was my turn to go, I took a quick glance to the traffic light on my left and since it was red, I jumped on my board. But while I was in mid-air above the stairs, the traffic light turned green. I landed in the street to the "screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech" of tires. The car bumper stopped literally inches from my kneecaps. My hands slammed on to the hood with a big thud! I looked up to see a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl staring at me, horrified, from behind the driver’s wheel.
She quickly pulled the car over and began asking frantically out of the car window, "Are you OK? Did I hit you? Are you hurt?" I didn’t have a scratch on me and thanked God for sparing my life. Then I realized this was the perfect opportunity to tell someone about eternal life. So I said to the girl, "I know where I would have gone if I had died. Do you know where you’re going?"
She looked at me with a huge smile and said, "Are you a Christian? I just got saved last week! And I don’t have any Christian friends at all!"
The next weekend she joined our Saturday morning Bible study group. God began transforming her the same way He had transformed me. We became good friends, but lost contact over the summer. It was a surprise to find each other at the same Bible college in the fall.
Then a representative from New Tribes Mission, Dunn Gordy, taught a class on tribal missions. He brought stacks of letters with him from tribal people begging for someone to come and teach them about the Bible. He copied the letters and handed them out in class.
I couldn’t believe what I was reading. The letters said things like "We want to know how to go to God’s good place after we die. We don’t want to go to the place of fire but we have no one to teach us. Please send someone quickly before too many more of us die!" One letter described the Good News of eternal life as "a big jar of sweet, delicious cookies" that we Americans and Westerners are "keeping all for ourselves because we don’t want to share."
Dunn Gordy said that while we were making our plans for our lives we also needed to consider what God would have us do with our lives.
But surely someone like me shouldn’t go to remote places like that, I rationalized. What about my passion for skateboarding? There’s no concrete in the jungle. Couldn’t I just start my skatepark in Los Angeles and talk to kids there about Jesus?
But I kept thinking about those letters. I couldn’t get it out of my head that any skateboarder in Los Angeles could just walk into a Walmart or a shopping mall and pick up the Bible and read about the message of eternal life. Or they could flip on the radio or TV and hear the truth.
The more I thought about it, the more it just didn’t seem right to skateboard my life away while entire people groups didn’t have any access to the Gospel.
The next day after class, I talked to Dun Gordy about it. "Do you really think that God could use me in tribal missions?" I asked him. "I’ve got a bunch of tattoos. What would the tribal people or other missionaries think of that? And I grew up in the suburbs. I don’t know the first thing about surviving in remote places."
He told me that tribal people have crazy tattoos too. He said that it didn’t matter what I looked like or where I came from, that God could use my life in tribal missions.
As it turned out, God was also working on that blonde-haired, blue-eyed friend of mine who had nearly run me over. We both decided there was nothing more we wanted to do with our lives than take the message of Jesus to people who hadn’t heard. We began joking with each other, "Hey, you could build your hut next to mine and we’ll work in the same tribe!" It was all downhill from there. Since we were best friends, had the same passions in life, and knew that building one hut was much more practical than building two, we got married.
Now nearly ten years later, my best friend and I are blessed to live in a remote jungles, bringing God’s message to the Dao people group. Jennie is the Bible translator and I am the Bible and literacy teacher. The friendships that we have forged here run deep. Neither Jennie nor I could ever be convinced that anything out there would be more fulfilling -- even running a skatepark in Los Angeles (although I do still pull out my skateboard whenever we go supply buying in the city).
Now the word I would use to describe my life is "privileged." It’s been a privilege to take the message of salvation to the Dao people and watch God transform their lives before our very eyes.