In the past few days, God has blowing my mind with what living a life on mission looks like. He has been teaching me a lot about what I like to call “sexy work”: the romanticized lifestyle of a missionary. I think that a lot of the world thinks that going on a mission trip means taking pictures with orphaned children while traveling the world. For a while, that’s what I thought it was. I thought that all missionaries just took really cute pictures and had perfect conversations with people they were evangelizing to. I was even so naive to think that every moment of their life was perfect because they were serving the Lord. I always wondered how people timed up their conversations in order to snap the perfect photo, and I always questioned how genuine a conversation could be when there is a $5,000 camera pointed at their faces. In my experience, living a life on mission isn’t about getting the cute photo or posting each time I build a relationship with someone new. God is teaching me to give glory to him in those special moments, instead of glorifying myself through my Instagram. I’ve learned that being a missionary is NOT sexy. I’ll tell you what it is: it’s waking up every single day and choosing to die to yourself by giving up the moments where you could glorify yourself to your friends and family, and it’s saying yes to WHATEVER God has for you that day. Sometimes that’s sweeping up duck poop in your classroom, and sometimes it’s praying over men and women who have leprosy. The work we do is hard and sometimes very dirty, but it is building up the kingdom of God. I’ve learned that my Instagram post doesn’t need 500 likes for it to be a “worthy” missionary post. God can use you to build kingdom wherever you are in ways that will glorify him. In my short time on the race, God has taught me so much about what it means to serve him in everything that I do, whether that’s here in Thailand or over Instagram. Even if the things that I do to further his kingdom mean getting peed on (ON MY FACE!!!) by a teammate.
Ain’t that sexy.
