Missionary:relating to, engaged in, or devoted to missions. A person who is sent to a foreign country to do religious work. A person undertaking a mission, especially a religious mission.
I am a missionary. For this year, I am a missionary, and I am a broken, selfish person. That is just a fact. Everything in me cringes internally a little when others have referred to me as that. Typing it felt wrong, saying it feels wrong. So much so that on Facebook, my “occupation” had the term volunteer instead of missionary in reference to my work with the World Race this year of my life. I don’t feel like I measure up to the ideal or the standards that are associated with missionaries. CONFESSION- More often than not, I am self serving, short with people, distrustful, sceptical. I put more value in people’s affirmation than God’s, care too much about how I appear, and can be careless with my money. I can be really bitchy. I cuss. (Sorry if I offended people, not sorry I said it. It’s real. ) Not even mentioning I apparently am prideful enough to think I can fix people. Talk about issues. More than all of that, I am a sinner saved by grace. I am my Father’s daughter. THAT is who I am. That just looks a little different this year.
I used to think missionaries lived the most exciting lives and were somehow immune to the everyday struggles of “normal” humans, or Christians. They were doing the “really hard work” for God that only a select few were cut out for. They left their home, gave up everything they were comfortable with, and adopted a new culture as their own, leaving all that was their own or a part of their identity when they hopped on that plane. Don’t let the pictures and exciting blogs fool you: Missionaries are people too.
Now don’t get me wrong: I am NOT discounting the sacrifices a lot of missionaries make for the people groups they fall in love with. There are missionaries who spend most every waking hour they have pouring into the lives of others in one form or the other. Who have no other people from their culture working with them at worst, or some that have a few on their team at best. Who dedicate their entire lives to trying to reach particular people groups. I am fully aware we have been absolutely spoiled this first month of the race. In our accommodations, our free time, our ministry hosts whom have blessed us tremendously in insisting we are well rested.
The pictures of mission work show nothing but the faces of children caked in dirt, beaming from ear to ear as the missionary loves on them or tickles them. Of an arm draped around a man or woman who appear destitute in physical needs, but are tremendously blessed in spirit, which is way more valuable. Manual labor being completed, sweat dripping down the faces of the missionaries who look as though they have never woken up and wished they could take the day off (or shoot, literally HAD to because they became sick from the foreign food being ingested.) Never do you see the photographs of, or read blogs of the down moments. The moments when you just sit and relax with your team, talking of things that have no “spiritual value” to them, but the laughter that ensues is good for the soul nonetheless. The travel days in which all you can manage is to stumble through them, half awake, sometimes sleeping on the shoulder of a stranger on accident, in which they humor you nicely.
As a child, the only knowledge I had of missionaries was the stories I had heard of a childhood friend who lived the life of an MK (missionary kid), or the ones I could imagine based on the heart tugging commercials, trying to persuade you to donate thirty bucks a month to feed a child. The imagined stories transitioned into actual accounts I heard from people I had met once I started actually attending church, to photos flicking across my Facebook page, to first hand experience on short term trips, to living vicariously through Racers when I was still too unsure if I would take that plunge myself.
I have absolutely no regrets coming on the World Race. I believe without a doubt this is what I am supposed to be doing this year, and in regards to what’s next? Well me and Jesus will cross that bridge when we come to it. But this year should be no different than the years to come. I am here with the intent to serve, to learn to better love as Jesus did, to be His hands, feet, ears, shoulder to cry on, His voice of hope to hearts broken, but more than that to get to know my Redeemer on a personal level. That however, should be no different than my goals at home. We are all missionaries, in that we are on a mission to share the hope in our hearts and the love and grace we have received as a gift from our Savior. He loves us more than we can ever comprehend. He loves EVERY SINGLE PERSON enough that He would die for them. He died just for me. Blows my mind. He died just for you. YOU. That’s it. That’s just a fact. If a stranger in front of us buys us a coffee or holds the door open, we are grateful. If the Creator of the universe is tortured to death, we shrug it off because our feeble minds don’t know what to do with that information. It’s craziness. Absolute insanity.
I have felt pretty numb the first month of this journey for a variety of reasons we will not hash out in this blog, but I will say that my heart has not broken in the way I was anticipated. In getting to experience the cultures I have had the chance to come face to face with, it has been reinforced how we are all the same. No matter the country, the culture, the color of skin, socioeconomic class, caste, none of it matters. The need for a Savior is just as real in the States as it is for the people I will meet all over this world, and as it is for my own broken heart. I cannot save people. My fellow teammates and squadmates are obviously going to be submerged into an abundance of different cultures, but as a whole, our hearts’ desires are that this is a lifetime commitment. Missionaries are broken people too, no better, no worse. What is a missionary but a person on a mission? Anyone who has experienced the Grace and Love that is absolutely life changing and can’t keep that in any longer? We are all the same: broken people whom God loves, adores, and wants nothing more than for us to say yes to Him, and that is a beautiful mystery.
