After deciding that there was one more box to check before Sheryl knows she is a “good Christian”, she trades her idyllic life in rural Colorado for the rice fields of Cambodia. There, along with her husband, seven kids, and twenty pieces of luggage, she intends to serve God as a missionary.  While her husband’s work as a motorcycle evangelist and anti-human trafficking investigator is dynamic and challenging, her own identity is mired in insecurity. 

 

To find a purpose, she needs to define what a good missionary is and stop comparing her life to what she left behind. By visiting AIDS patients, holding dying children, and pouring herself in language study, Sheryl attempts to give meaning to her new world all the while reluctant to rob her children of her motherhood or to rob herself of her calling to home and hearth.

 

After several pregnancies and pregnancy losses, cultural traumas, and home culture misunderstandings, she finds herself falling into cynicism and despair in a land plagued with its own decades of trauma.

 

When the birth of her last child turns frightening, she learns that the people she trusted the least are the ones who showed up to keep her and her baby alive. Through it all, she realizes that the faith she came to Cambodia with is insufficient. Will her newfound life require a complete exit from Protestantism and their call to Cambodia, and who will that make her now?