I was born in the mountains of northern Pakistan, in a small town looking out over Kashmir.

The name of the town is Murree. According to local legend, Jesus Christ himself had passed through after his crucifixion, on his way from Palestine to India. His mother died en route, within sight of the distant mountains above Srinagar where her son the Messiah, the healer, would at last find peace. Hence the name—Murree, as in Mary, the mother of Jesus.

A small shrine built of loose stone marked the place where she was buried. Local village women made their way...

For my parents, Murree was never more than a temporary home, a place to come to for a brief rest during the summer months when the heat in the rest of Pakistan became intolerable, when the thermometer in some areas reached more than 120 degrees in the shade. Our permanent address was always in Sind, Pakistan’s southernmost province seven hundred miles to the south, squeezed between Baluchistan, Punjab, Rajasthan, and the Arabian Sea. We lived in Upper Sind with a handful of other Baptist missionary families from September to May each year, in the village of Ratodero first and then...

I have often wondered what brought my mother and father from rural middle Georgia to the hardscrabble mission fields of Sind. Even now, I do not completely understand. The few surviving photographs give little enough away and it is harder still to imagine parents who were ever young. It seems almost unimaginable that the handsome, earnest man with piercing eyes looking out from the missionary prayer card published in the early 1950s should have been my father. It is just as far-fetched that the young woman with the dark eyes and hopeful look seated beside him should have been my...

Murree became the defining geographic feature of my early life, even as middle Georgia served that purpose for my parents. It was not only that I happened to be born there, that it was stamped into my passport, that it caused comment and consternation among officialdom whenever I applied for a visa, went through a customs clearance, or filled out any government form that demanded information on date and place of birth; it was also because I went to school there. I lived in Murree for nine months out of every year, until I reached the age of eighteen. I...

God talk came easily to us, from an early age. We breathed the Bible. Jesus Christ was a living presence, not some shadowy figure who walked the earth centuries ago. Spiritual interpretations applied to every aspect of our lives. No matter was so trivial that God would not be interested, no event so small that His hand was not somehow upon it. His power held the universe together, His love extended to the smallest of His creatures, His grace was sufficient for seeing us safely through our own brief sojourn upon this earth. In the end, our religion became as...

Pakistan’s first major war with India passed me by. The year was 1965 and we had just arrived in Georgia for one year of furlough. I was eight years old. I was about to enter third grade and I was watching television for the first time. The evening news became a family altar, Walter Cronkite a secular prophet neatly packaging events of the day in comprehensible form. Each newscast ended with the same reassuring statement: “And that’s the way it is.” As if all that was significant and happened in the world in the last twenty-four hours, to all three...

During the 1960s, the flotsam of Europe began making its weary way toward the mystical East. Kathmandu and Goa were the usual destinations, Shikarpur only a hot and dusty transit point along the way. Some travellers ended up on our doorstep. “One of your people,” the locals would say, introducing yet another bedraggled visitor who almost always was skeptical about missionaries but nonetheless welcomed a hot shower and free room and board for the night. As far as the Shikarpuris were concerned, anyone with a pala face and a European or American passport had to be a Christian.Everyone was born...

A strong awareness of the fragility of our lives was instilled in us from an early age. This sense had little to do with religious instruction or the formal aspects of our upbringing. It was based more on what we saw around us every day. People were always dying; it was as if the smell of mortality hung permanently in the air. Pakistani Christians followed the lead of Muslims when it came to burial customs. If someone died in the morning, they would be buried in a seamless white shroud before dusk.

Early in his ministry, my father buried a...

As missionary children, we grew up with many of the advantages of wealth without actually having it. Family income never exceeded nine thousand dollars a year, even as late as 1975, the year I graduated from high school. But that figure did not include at least one important side benefit—foreign travel. Every fifth year, on our return visit to America, we enjoyed a missionary version of the Grand Tour, usually in Europe and usually for less than a week at a time. By the time I was ten years old, I had waved at Pope Paul from St. Peter’s...

A lingering concern throughout our final furlough in Georgia was the fear that we might not return to Pakistan. Visas were one possible stumbling block, the political situation on the Indian Subcontinent another. For a brief time, my father also considered an alternate career, one that would have kept us in the United States forever. I desperately wanted to graduate from Murree Christian School and would have been bitterly disappointed had we not gone back.

The visa situation was always problematic, even in the 1950s when my parents first arrived in Pakistan. From time to time, articles appeared in local...