When my family arrived in Madrid in 1983, my three brothers and I— all blond-haired, blue-eyed American boys— looked nothing like the Spaniards around us. We were the only foreigners I knew in San Blas, a working-class neighborhood that would become Europe’s largest drug supermarket. My parents, Elliott and Mary Tepper, had come as missionaries, initially hoping to plant a church among university students. Instead, God called them to work with heroin addicts. Our living room became the birthplace of Betel, a drug rehabilitation center that has now helped over 100,000 addicts worldwide.
Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction tells the story of growing up in this unlikely mission field during the height of the AIDS epidemic. It chronicles how our family apartment became “Hotel Tepper,” filled with recovering addicts who became my brothers and sisters. Men like Raúl, a former dealer and armed robber who became the first resident of Betel and later a powerful preacher. Like Jambri, who had robbed banks and spent five years in prison, but then became the one who encouraged me to love Italian language and culture from his hospital bed in Naples.
Being a preacher’s kid meant something different in our home than in most. As I write in the book: “If your parents are engineers, plumbers or lawyers, it doesn’t matter one bit to your life, but if your parents are missionaries, it changes everything. You can’t pick your parents, but they get to pick your life.” We didn’t have baseball or American football— we had Friday night street evangelism and Sunday services filled with tattooed ex-junkies. Our vacation destinations weren’t Yosemite or Disney World, but drug rehabs across Spain where we met recovering addicts.
The collision between our missionary life and the surrounding world created constant tension. At school, I was one student among many. At home and in Betel, I was the preacher’s kid who had to set an example. When classmates asked about my parents’ work, I struggled to explain. How could I convey that our family lived day-to-day on offerings from American churches, that we ate sardines and lentils when exchange rates moved against us, or that I spent weekends visiting friends dying of AIDS in the infectious diseases ward?
Yet missionary kid memoirs often lack honest grappling with faith itself. Shooting Up doesn’t shy away from doubt. When my nine-year-old brother Timothy died in a car accident in 1991, followed by the deaths of Raúl, Jambri, and dozens of friends from AIDS, I questioned everything. Where was God when the hospital filled with the dying? Why did missionaries’ children suffer alongside everyone else?
The memoir also tells the story of thriving despite unconventional circumstances. When exchange rates made missionary school unaffordable, my mother homeschooled us for two years. Without formal textbooks, my brothers and I taught ourselves, eventually all graduating together from Oxford University. I became a Rhodes Scholar— not despite my missionary kid upbringing, but in many ways because of it.
What makes my story universal is its exploration of love in unlikely places. My parents showed me that the answer to suffering is always more love— love for the outcasts, the dying, the “throw-away people” society ignores. They demonstrated that faith without action is hollow, that true Christianity looks like washing the wounds of addicts and sitting with the dying.
My story isn’t a triumphalist missionary story with easy answers and tidy conversions. It’s messy— full of relapses, deaths, and questions without answers. But it’s also full of grace, transformation, and the stubborn hope that refuses to abandon people, even when medical science offers no cure and society offers no second chances.
For missionary kids who’ve felt caught between worlds— too foreign for their host country, too different for their passport country— my story offers recognition. For those who’ve questioned their parents’ choices or struggled with the cost of the calling, it offers honest companionship. And for anyone who’s loved and lost, it offers a meditation on memory, grief, and the power of love to transcend even death.
Jonathan Tepper is the author of several acclaimed financial books, including The Myth of Capitalism. A Rhodes Scholar, he earned degrees in History and Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MLitt from the University of Oxford. Jonathan is a missionary kid. Born in the U.S. and raised in Mexico as a very young child, Jonathan came of age in Madrid’s San Blas neighborhood, where his parents ran one of the country’s first drug rehabilitation centers. Shooting Up is his first memoir, offering a deeply personal view of life at the intersection of faith, addiction, and resilience. He and his wife Stacey have a two-year-old who is a human hurricane of curiosity and keeps them busy. Jonathan returns to Madrid as often as he can.
Book: Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction
Find him online at http://www.jonathan-tepper.com
