I’ll admit it. I’m
not a great missionary.
In fact, I might
be a bad missionary.
(I don’t want to speak for my wife, who may be among the
best missionaries ever, though I suspect she’d laugh at this suggestion)
When I read the stories of awe-inspiring missionaries like
Hudson Taylor, William Carey, Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, and even one of the
founders of SIM, Rowland Bingham, I am struck by their staunch faith, their authoritative
power over the demonic, their consistent lives of evangelism, and their
ceaseless intercession for those they were serving. This is of course not to mention that they
also were overcoming huge distances from home and family, disparaging
loneliness, no internet or Facebook to stay connected, no electricity or water
sources, perpetual threats of life and limb, and the plagues of diseases such
as malaria and typhoid before treatments had been discovered.
Okay, so you may say it isn’t a fair comparison to line
yourself up against the “greats,” but let me take you back to one night a
couple weeks ago…
It was 3:00 in the morning.
I had been lying on the floor of the bathroom for the past hour because
it seemed too painful to try to get up and back to bed. For the prior 24 hours I had been cycling
between freezing cold and blazing hot.
Between the two extremes I would just lay still yet my body shook on its
own as if having a seizure. Every bone
and muscle in my body felt bruised.
Curled up in the fetal position on my tile floor that night I was hit by
a sudden feeling. No, more like a compulsion.
“I just want to go home,” my mind whimpered. I closed my eyes in defeat.
The next morning I was talking with my beautiful, strong,
supportive wife about the prior night and the confession of my unconscious
psyche. “YES!” she shouted, complete
with fist pump. I was dumbfounded, and a
little offended. She continued, “It took
you two and a half years, but now you finally said it too! Look at you!
You’re human!”
I can’t say I was particularly encouraged by her
enthusiastic response, but I couldn’t help but laugh. And once again, my wife was right. (maybe I
shouldn’t admit that in writing)
There is a problem in contemporary missions, and it’s
twofold. First, we in the West have
created a system that places missionaries into the stratum of Christian
superheroes. Forget pastors being one
step below God, we’ve all watched pastors fail publically and fail big. They must be mere humans. But missionaries! Now they are people just short of godly
perfection! Partly that interpretation
comes about from the same problem I have in comparing myself to books of
missionary heroes. You can’t compare a
partial story, just the best and most interesting parts of their lives and
ministries, to your entire story, blemishes and failures and all the unpolished
pieces of your life. And what does the
average American Christian hear from missionaries? It is the story of an entire tribe coming to
Christ after seeing the Jesus video, the snapshot of a dirty young boy getting
a drink from the new well someone dug in their village and the caption of “173
people heard the Gospel because of this project.” When monthly or quarterly newsletters come
out from missionaries, they rarely highlight an episode of lying on the floor
through the night trying not to puke their liver out.
The second part of this misinformation about missionaries is
somewhat related. Western sending
churches want Western-style reports that will pump up the investors. They want to hear good news. They want to
hear about lives being changed with specific numbers of how many were converted,
but preferably in 200 words or less.
Admittedly, this perceived pressure on missionaries to meet expectations
of miraculous results with every newsletter comes partially from the missionaries
themselves; afraid that support will stop if reports are not rosy (unfortunately
this happens). But look through books or
articles on how to write missionary newsletters and you’ll be hard pressed to
find much other than how to encourage your readers and sustain their
support. Want more evidence? Read actual
missionary newsletters and you’ll see it yourself. Even when there is little of excitement to
report, missionaries can find ways to word the mundane and elongate the
smallest good news to create a paper pep rally for missions.
But I’m going to step out of the shadows for a moment [at
the risk of losing supporters]. Being a
missionary does not make you a rock star.
In fact, we’ve found that being a missionary is a surefire way to bring
hurt, heartache, and challenges.
Becoming a missionary doesn’t make you automatically nearly
God-like. Rather, we see that it
regularly (and sometimes painfully) points out failures, shortcomings, and
areas of sin lodged in our lives. Living
as a missionary does not mean that as you walk through the market everyday
people will fall at your feet in repentance, begging to know the way to
salvation. We find that getting
opportunities to fully and powerfully share the Gospel take hard work and a
long time – and seeing lives change at these invitations really has nothing to
do with us and everything to do with God!
Now let me change directions before you call our sending
agency to yank us out of Nigeria. We are
not missionary superstars. We know that
and we accept that. We are weak. We still have a sin nature and issues that God
is patiently working out in us. We get
sick. We are sometimes discouraged and
feel like we should just go home. We
sometimes share the Gospel and are met with rejection or apathy. And not every patient I treat at the hospital
lives to go home.
BUT – We serve a God who uses imperfect people to work out
his perfect will [consider Jonah or David].
We have a God who prefers we recognize our weakness and limitations so
we depend fully on him alone. We serve a
God who hears our prayers for patients in the hospital and has, more times than
we can count, worked miracles saving people who by all medical logic should
have died. We have a God who is alive
and at work in Nigeria and who, for his own glory, chooses to use us as he
changes hearts and lives, drawing many to Himself.
The day following my bathroom meltdown I was thinking back
on my response and asked God if that was the true condition of my heart and
should I really be packing up. He said
no, and reminded me of one of my favorite verses, 1 Corinthians 12:9 “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power
is made perfect in weakness.”
I may never be a Hudson Taylor or a Rowland Bingham, and I
may never make it as a Christian superhero.
Only God knows that. But I thank
God that he continues to work in our lives and in the lives of those around
us. I’m no Paul, but even he admitted, “Not that I have already obtained all this,
or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for
which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to
have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is ahead, I press on
toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in
Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:12-14)
