Finding One’s Function in a Fractured World

A Quest for Purpose by Ruth Keidel Clemens

Ruth Keidel Clemens‘s A Quest for Purpose is a vivid and inspiring memoir that invites readers to examine their lives.

Clemens grew up as a “missionary kid” in the Democratic Republic of Congo during one of the most turbulent periods in that nation’s history. Her parents, Levi and Eudene Keidel, were Mennonite missionaries who built schools and medical dispensaries in the Kasai Provinces, and their daughter absorbed not only their faith but their fierce, flexible resilience. The book traces how that inheritance shaped her through a life that eventually carried her from the jungles of Congo to the refugee camps of Southeast Asia and the streets of Baltimore.

A Memoir Rooted in Survival and Calling

What makes this memoir exceptional is Clemens’s gift for the concrete detail. She does not summarize her childhood in Africa; she recreates it. In one of the book’s early chapters, a teenage Ruth climbs an overhanging tree to retrieve her father’s nightline catch, only to disturb a massive wasp nest. What follows — anaphylactic shock, two improvised nurse-mothers, a Congolese neighbor pedaling thirty-five miles on a rickety bicycle to the nearest medical dispensary — is written with such immediacy that the reader’s pulse quickens alongside Ruth’s fading one. During this near-death crisis, the young girl experiences something unexpected: a profound, settled peace. That moment becomes a pivot point for the entire memoir, the first clear signal that her life must mean something.

Clemens is also honest about the moral complexities of the world she was born into. She does not romanticize the missionary enterprise or pretend that the presence of well-meaning Westerners in colonial Africa was uncomplicated. She holds the tension openly and that intellectual honesty gives the book a credibility and maturity that lesser memoirs avoid. This is a woman who has thought hard about privilege, about calling, about who gets to write the story of a place and its people.

The evacuation chapters, in which a five-year-old Ruth rides in a missionary caravan out of an increasingly dangerous Congo, past stone-strewn roads and panicked Belgian colonials, are cinematically written. A nighttime stop at a Catholic mission where lions roar from the prairie, a little girl listening anxiously for the sound of the men’s footsteps returning safely inside are scenes that feel novelistic without ever sacrificing their truth.

The Search for “Function”

Throughout, the throughline is the word “function” — a term Clemens later encounters from English learners in post-war Cambodia, who use it to mean one’s unique purpose in life. It becomes her organizing metaphor, and it works beautifully. Rather than imposing a tidy spiritual arc onto messy experience, Clemens shows how purpose reveals itself gradually, in the accumulation of stories, of hardships survived, of communities served.

A Quest for Purpose is an invitation. Clemens tells her story not to monument herself but to hold up a mirror to the reader. What are your touchpoints? What has shaped your resilience? What is your function? These are questions worth sitting with.