“I was in a Montessori school for six months when I was young,” Tony said as we toured a classroom of yellow and blue-clad six year olds. “There were lots of trays.” We passed a shelf of small silver trays, each with something different on them: scissors, blocks, cards. There was a turtle too, but it wasn’t on a tray. It was in an aquarium.
On Tuesday we flew to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It’s hard to properly articulate how grateful I was for the two hour flight after months of two-day-long bus rides. It was so blessedly comfortable. I boarded a plane, watched an episode of Mr. Bean, ate chicken lasagna, and enjoyed a flight that barely allowed enough time to roughly calculate that driving to Kuala Lumpur from Phnom Penh would have taken 40 hours. I wasn’t even annoyed when the person in front of me reclined all the way into my lap.
We were picked up at the airport by our new hosts and taken to a cluster of tall buildings. The school we are working with this month occupies floors in five of them, enough space for nearly 1000 underprivileged students to receive an excellent, student-driven education modeled after the pedagogy of Maria Montessori, a privilege usually reserved for wealthy families in the US. I didn’t know anything about Montessori schools until today, when I learned that we’d been placed at one, and I love what I see, trays and turtles and all.
This is the last week school’s in session before the holiday, so my team won’t work with many students. Instead, we’ll be serving by repainting classrooms, organizing books, and doing other odd jobs. But we’ll also have chances to help some of the kids read in English.
On Tuesday, I got an extra special treat. When we left ITCS last month, I thought I had played a piano for the last time on this trip. Last month, I got to play one all the time, for chapel, for worship nights, to teach music, and for fun. It was a month full of music, and I was okay with holding out for one more month before playing at home again.
But guess what? Here at the school there is a choir, and the director had been wanting an accompanist for rehearsals to teach part and play the songs! So guess what I did for four hours a day last week? Played piano for a choir.
I accompanied our high school’s choir all four years, and it was great to be back. I enjoyed teaching the singers their parts, putting the parts together, and hearing the harmonies for the first time. I was delighted as I sightread a song, the notes falling into place easily, my eyes scanning the next measures, my head turning periodically to the director. We sang another song, and I was asked to transpose the piece down a half step, and, after a minute, One Moment in Time was in the key of D. It was fun to do something I love so much and have so much experience in.
It also got me thinking.
Sometimes on the Race, you get to use your gifts to really bless a ministry. You can do what you’re good at, whether it’s teaching, playing music, advertising, or welding, and you are happy and the people you help are happy. These times are great, but it won’t do to spend all your time sitting and waiting for them to present themselves.
Because far more often on the Race, you have to do work that doesn’t align with your gifts. You are asked to bless people by doing jobs that you’re not good at or passionate about. Those are the times it’s a struggle to invest yourself in the work God’s called you to.
Most of the time, it hasn’t been a piano. In February, someone handed me a pickaxe and told me to break up a boulder to build a Guatemalan road, and I thought it was funny and tried my hardest and did basically nothing. But then in El Salvador it happened again when someone told me to teach preschool and I didn’t know how to control the class or keep them from peeing their pants, and my attitude got worse. And then in Albania I was told to whitewash ceilings for three weeks and pull weeds from the cracks in cement, and in Zambia they told me to evangelize door to door, and in Mozambique I had to lay bricks, and in Cambodia I had to play soccer.
Here’s me not being incredibly passionate about whitewashing in Albania one day. My arms must have been tired.
So many people come on the Race and experience ministry they’re passionate about. You hear about that a lot in blogs. But also know that everyone spends plenty of time on the Race in ministries they are bad at, don’t care about, or don’t enjoy. It’s during that kind of work that God does some extra special work in you: God transforms you into someone who can work humbly and faithfully at pretty much anything. You become someone who doesn’t avoid hard work, but adapts through it into someone who doesn’t need to be the best at everything. It’s not about liking the work, even though that makes it more fun. It’s about committing to the God, people, and countries you were called to by serving in whatever capacity is needed.
When we learn to lay aside our preferences and show up for the job at hand, God shows up and blesses us, teaches us, strengthens us, and challenges us. So in these last three weeks (!!!!!!!!) of ministry on the Race, pray for my team and me to throw ourselves into all the ministry we can, whether we are experts or amateurs, whether we are tired or energetic, and whether we are happy to be here or anxious to go home.
