One of the things I have liked best about my experience with Adventures in Missions/ The World Race is that they acknowledge, nurture, and emphasize how much this crazy adventure is going to change ME.
I think too often we look at mission work, especially internationally, as if we are the answer bringing light to all the questions. Americans come from the wealthiest, most powerful, most enviable country in the world. But most of that means nothing to the cause of the Gospel. Yet, because of our cultural status in the world, we look at ourselves as the ones going to bring the gospel to the world. Often it is subtle, but I think we can be guilty of believing that we are the ones harboring the Answer and the world needs us to deliver it to them.
My limited mission experiences has taught me, quite humbly, that I bring nothing to the field. The gospel is already there. And while physical needs around the world are serious and devastating, there is much to say about the spiritual malnutrition in America. I fully believe that one of the best things to happen to American churches would be to host missionaries/ mission groups from other countries. The fact that we eat well, have clean water, and are familiar with the gospel stories does not exempt us from needing to know more of God. And, believe it or not, there are pieces of Him that other peoples and other cultures under the sun have unique and enviable knowledge of.
Being a missionary is not about being the Great White Hope to all the downtrodden of the world. It is about SHARING in the gospel with the rest of the world. It is about admitting that God is bigger than the culture, situation, and experiences that we are familiar with. Celebrating that HE exists and manifests Himself in other cultures as diversely as He reveals Himself in different individuals. And that we simply cannot know the way God is working in Africa without being a part of what God is doing in Africa. One of the quickest lessons I learned in youth ministry was that the teenagers will change, encourage, and inspire me at least as much as I will them. By sharing our lives together, both parties know God more intimately and worship Him more fully.
One of my real frustrations is the idea that we can do more just sending money to other cultures to help with their problems. Our wealth could do volumes to help with the physical ailments and gross injustices in the world. But we won’t readily give it unless we are changed. Most of us give out of a sense of duty or to squander some light guilt bubbling up. But the solution to clean water around the world is giving born from love. I know nothing but my own experience. And, in my own experience, I cared very little about world problems when they were sappy commercials and easily ignored posters. Not until the world became faces, friends, unique revelations of the Presence of Christ, did I truly begin to care and invest in being a part of that community. The shock of my life has been falling in love with friends suffering physically around the world, yet being envious of their lives because they were saturated with a dependence on and adoration for God that was beyond anything I have known. I would trade my comfort for their love of God in an instant.
I want to know God as fully as I possibly can. And while there is more that He is doing in my community than I could understand in a lifetime, there is a vast array of unimaginable ways that He is shining in every tribe and nation under the stars. I go to change them. I go to change me. I go to worship God.
It is so hard and so humbling to try to “prepare” for the World Race. I have nothing to give. Nothing to carry over the oceans with me that is of any value; other than my experiences in encountering the Risen Christ. And the hope that, in my emptiness, He may speak/act/love in my stead. That I might be used as a tool to help disciple my squad-mates and the peoples of the world. ALSO, to understand and accept that I need parts of God that I do not yet know to be revealed to me through my squad-mates and the peoples of the world. The preparation for making disciples and being made into a disciple is one and the same, total surrender to the only Entity that unites and controls them both.
Because, ultimately, it is not about who is changing who. All of life is just about celebrating who Christ is. He has called me on this journey for the benefit of His Kingdom. So, I go imperfectly, yet faithfully, trusting that “to change” and “to be changed” simply means “to worship more…together.”
