You are standing on a sidewalk in front of an eggshell yellow building. There are lines hanging from the support pillars that are overloaded with clothes that are drying as best they can during monsoon season in Myanmar. Inside of the building, there is a study with hundreds of books and a desk that holds jams, coffee, bags of oats, and other non-perishable foods to be eaten by the group of 21 people staying in the building.
Walking through the building, there are three rooms. They have walls that don’t go up to the ceiling, and the doors rarely shut. You can hear the single fan working to cool down each of the rooms, knowing that it isn’t working. The rooms themselves are stuffed with people and bags. Each room bursts with 8 people and their belongings that they’ve been lugging around the world on their backs. There’s a side door that leads outside.
Glorified outhouses made of cement and the same eggshell yellow paint are at the end of the walkway outside the door, where you have to squat not sit in order to use them. And between the squatty potties and the eggshell yellow building, there is a tarp covered area. A tree’s branches and leaves create the roof, and through ingenuity and flimsy beams of wood, the tarps are the walls that keep the inside hidden.
Inside you will see a large cement basin that holds the clean-ish water used for washing hands, bathing, and hand-washed laundry. And though you will never see this posted on social media, as it begins to rain, there is a young American woman, naked, crouched down by the basin, wetting her hair to clean it, completely at peace.
She has grown up with a shower that is in a room, where a handle will make it the perfect temperature and the water will continue to run until told to stop, and if it rains, she wouldn’t know. She knows what it is to have a room all to herself, with drawers and closets that hide away her many clothes and random trinkets. She can easily walk to a kitchen inside her home and open the fridge with a relative abundant selection of food. She has lived in a home where the air can be told to be warmer or cooler, and it will obey.
But she left all of that and is completely content and at peace, in a building that is not her home, sharing with 20 other people, sleeping on a mini air mattress, and taking a shower outside with a bowl.
This is the hidden missionary. This is the missionary you won’t see on facebook or instagram. This is the life you won’t hear in a newsletter or on a Sunday when they visit your church.
After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him, and Levi got up, left everything and followed him.
– Luke 5:27-28
Jesus went up on a mountainside and called to him those he wanted, and they came to him.
– Mark 3:13
And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.
– Matthew 19:29
Most of what people think of missions come from the single picture posted or the 5-minute snapshot you hear when you ask someone “oh, how is life as a missionary?” There is no way to convey what it means to live life on mission in a single picture or conversation. I don’t expect to know your life from your facebook posts, because it’s filtered and condensed into something that is going to be accepted.
I did not come on the World Race, I did not decide to be a missionary for a year because of the pictures I would get. I came because God said to. And that’s not easily caputurable by media. My life isn’t moment after moment of cute kid pictures and baptisms and healings (although, when those moments come, they are beautiful and exciting and full of joy). Much of life on mission is submission.
It’s submitting to God’s will and His calling even when it isn’t comfortable. It is stepping out of everyone’s expectations in order to follow the still, small voice in your spirit saying, “go”. It is dying to your self (ie. letting go of your rights) and living the lifestyle of those you want to reach. It is finding peace and God in every single moment because you know you are living the life He has called you to live.
The hidden missionary is often overlooked and ignored. In the states, the life of a missionary is glamorized by awe and adoration of going to a place that is hard. But the hidden missionary is the one who smiles and daily gives everything God, because without Him, it would be impossible to live out this calling.
And in simple moments, when everything is quiet and calm, and you are crouching down to get your hair wet, you smile because the peace of God is there, saying, “Well done, daughter.”
