Jonathan Tepper’s family wasn’t your typical missionary family. His dad was Jewish convert to evangelicalism. He had an MBA from Harvard but decided to be a missionary instead, first in Latin America then in the drug-riddled slums of Madrid, where he and his wife started Betel, what became a multi-country ministry that has rehabilitated thousands of drug addicts. When Jonathan was growing up, the AIDS crisis swept through the Betel community, and Jonathan lost multiple people he considered big brothers and sisters. He also lost one of his actual brothers, in a car accident.
Unlike mine, his new book, Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction, is not a commentary on missions or evangelicalism, and you’ll find he’s reticent to answer my questions along those lines. Instead, he has written a traditional, narrative memoir. Nonetheless, as an MK, I related to various thematic elements of his story, although at times, I was at times frustrated by his refusal to explicitly draw them out. But the general reader will be moved by this beautiful story of what it means to love across divides and in the face of overwhelming grief.
