When you picture married couples on the mission field, maybe you picture the wife staying home to teach the kids and manage the household while the husband does ministry or tentmaking work. Maybe you picture them shoulder-to-shoulder, leading a team or running a nonprofit together. Or maybe you imagine something in between.

There are as many ways to have a successful marriage on the field as there are married people on the field. I don’t have a prescription for a happy, healthy marriage on the field. What I can offer you is a description of one very real marriage on the field and some of the joys and challenges we’ve faced.

The Gift and Challenges of Time Together

Before we moved overseas, my husband worked full time in youth ministry, and I worked full time in public relations while volunteering with the youth ministry. We had two small children and very little margin. I didn’t expect it to be much different when we moved overseas, but I hoped we’d have a stronger sense of working towards a unified vision.

When we moved to North Africa in 2018, we were part of an eight-month “intensive” internship program. We were pleasantly surprised to discover we had more time together than we’d known in years! On Sundays, instead of serving at church from dawn to dusk, we took our kids on excursions to get to know our new home. During the week, we did almost everything together. We went to Arabic classes and training sessions, and since we didn’t have a car yet, we walked everywhere. Even with the stress of moving our family overseas, we had less conflict than any of the previous seasons of our lives, because we simply had more time to talk.

Of course, as the years went on and our responsibilities increased, our margin decreased. But even now, our relatively flexible work schedules allow us the freedom to grab an afternoon coffee together, if we need to catch up. We try to avoid scheduling lots of evening meetings, both so we have time to relax and connect in the evening, and so we can go out for dates occasionally.

One of the biggest challenges we face as a couple on the field is finding opportunities for extended times alone together. While it’s easy to grab a quick mid-week coffee, it’s difficult to get a weekend away. With our families living an ocean away and our teammates busy with their own work and families, it’s difficult to leave our kids for more than just a night out while we’re in-country. We have taken the opportunity to get away together while we’re on home ministry assignment, but even then, it’s hard to take time away from our packed schedule of supporter meetings and traveling to visit family.

Reassessing Gender Roles

Going to the field as a married couple also gave us a unique opportunity to reassess our assumptions about gender roles—and probably not in the way you expect. As children of the '90s with two working parents each, my husband and I never assumed my role would be stay-at-home mom. And as people who launched into adulthood as the U.S. economy was crashing, we also assumed we would both have to work. But moving to the field and living on support gave us more flexibility to think about what kind of life made the most sense—for our family, our personalities, our vision, and for the culture.

Before our third child was born, I wrote blog posts and managed social media accounts for our tourism company. But when our third child came along, it felt like more than I could manage, so I stopped. Even though I’d only been working part-time, I really wrestled with the idea of my identity being just “mom,” not “mom and public relations specialist.” But I also recognized I’d been given a unique opportunity to embrace a season of focusing primarily on my home and my kids, a privilege not many women today have.

Both working mom and stay-at-home mom are accepted roles in the country where we live. However, women are still expected to do most of the cooking, cleaning, and hospitality work. This is an area of our life where we have both accepted cultural norms and pushed back a bit. When local friends come over for dinner, I do my best to go into hostess mode, even though I’m a terrible multitasker and struggle to do things like make tea and have a conversation at the same time! But while I manage most of the cleaning and meal planning in our home, my husband has taken over a lot of the cooking since our third child was born. We realized he was both more skilled and more efficient in this area—it just made sense!

Shared Vision and Mission

Going to the field together indeed gave my husband and me a shared sense of vision and purpose. We share a vision for what we want to see happen in our city. We share a desire to see our team using their gifts to share the gospel and thrive in our context. We share a love for our friends and neighbors and a longing to see them enter the kingdom of God. These shared values and desires are like a torch in the night—something we can focus on and walk toward when life feels chaotic, or we feel pulled in many directions.

I think one of our most important tasks is helping each other keep our eyes on that torch. We’ve each walked through seasons of discouragement, weariness, and doubt. We don’t always feel the same about our life and calling here—we ebb and flow in our positivity and passion. We’ve had to learn how to lean on each other when we’re the one who’s low on faith or optimism and how to encourage each other when we’re the one with a surplus.

And while our calling to North Africa is shared, our skills, abilities, and some responsibilities are unique. That means sometimes we feel more like passing ships in the night than crew members rowing in the same boat. On any given day, my husband might be in meetings for his tourism business and driving to different government offices to secure our visas while I’m attending Arabic lessons and meeting a teammate for coffee. Some days it feels like we communicate only via text messages!

At times, we’ve struggled with a sense of unfairness or inadequacy. Sometimes one of us feels like we’re spending more time doing the kinds of things that keep us alive, healthy, and legal—planning meals, taking kids to doctors’ appointments, muddling through government bureaucracy—than doing the ministry work that brought us here in the first place! Sometimes it feels impossible to do both things well. In those times, we must remind each other that there is a season for everything—and there are two of us for a reason. The phase of life or work or ministry we’re in might require one of us to do more of the behind-the-scenes support while the other focuses on outreach or team leadership, and that’s okay.

Going to the field as a married couple has provided both challenges and opportunities—many of them unexpected—to grow closer to each other, to develop as individuals, and to rely on God. I hope you’ll join me in praying for couples on the field around the world, that God would strengthen them, encourage them, and fill them with his love and grace.