When people imagine being a missionary they usually think of working with starving children in orphanages, helping with disaster relief, healing the sick, clothing the naked and feeding the hungry, but it’s not always like that. Going into the mission field I never expected God to be calling me to seek out personal reformation over the radical work I always heard about, but that’s how my first month has been.
Now having said that, that doesn’t mean that we’ve been sitting around doing nothing, we have been working in construction, building a second floor on a house for a woman with seven children, as well as putting on discipleship classes for youth and teaching a principles & values classes. It’s been amazing to get to know the students and to see how interested they are in our lives back home in the United States as well as seeing the physical improvement and transformation of the house. While building the house is great, missionary work is really about relationship. The physical labor has given us the chance to begin relationships with the neighbor kids and it’s so exciting to see how quickly we were accepted; now the kids even know us by name! Most days when I walk into the house I see a 2-year-old girl named Chilan. When I walk in Chilan will look to me with outstretched arms as if she is saying, “Hold me”. Our quick and easy acceptance into the community makes me wonder why we have a hard time doing that, at home, in the same way. Why we can’t be immediately open, vulnerable and accepting of any person?
Now back to my original point, God’s been pushing me to be working on my own life and to be seeking Him out, completely and totally in everything. Being on the race and being thrown into such deep intimate community with people, has been amazing but also very difficult. God’s nudging me to seek Him while allowing Him to shape and mold me while also living in close intimate relationship has forced me to quickly realize and face the parts of my life, the pain and hurt, that I had been pushing down for so long. God is teaching me that if I ever want to embrace true community I am going to have to make myself vulnerable and reach into those deep parts of my heart that hadn’t seen light in years. I had to expose these to not only myself but to those around me for the possibility of true relationship and a true deep relationship in Christ.
If we ever want to truly pursue a full, loving, trusting relationship with our brothers and sisters around us we must first open ourselves to them so that they can accurately build us up and pursue us with righteous judgment. My relationship with Chilan didn’t begin with her outstretched arms pointed towards me. She first had to trust me and be vulnerable. Now she will run to me with open arms every time she sees me, knowing that I will pick her up and I won’t drop her. This trusting, loving relationship is the embodiment of our relationship with Christ and a living, breathing example of what our relationship with our brothers and sisters in Christ can be.
“Fears are like bad dreams. They are much less powerful when you can look at them in the light.” Henry Cloud
