Over the past three months, my team has been living on a farm/activities center, doing various manual labor jobs to fix the place up. We’ve whitewashed for countless hours, and then gone back and white washed the same spots again a month after. We’ve pulled the same weeds over and over again. Cleaned rooms, chairs, floors, gates. And here recently, we’ve cleaned up a lot of poop.
People are not really a thing we see anymore. We work from 8 to 12, take a lunch break and get back to work from 2 to 4. Town is about a 30 to 40 minute walk away, and we have to be back before dark at 7. So we don’t really get a chance to go into town except on our off days. The only people we see in a day is our team mates, the farm hand Frock, and our cook Dusha. Both of whom speak very little english.
This is not what many of us had in mind when we pictured the World Race. There’s a reason none of our pictures get advertised on social media, because the life we’re living and the ministry we’re doing is not the stuff of missionary dreams. We get covered in dirt and poop instead of getting hugs and kisses from little orphan children. We do the same jobs over and over again instead of seeing progress while building a church or school. The only people we see change in are ourselves instead of praying over the lost and sharing the gospel. How is this even ministry?
I feel like there’s a picture of what “ministry” looks like, and this isn’t it. When people sign up for missions trips or become missionaries they have a picture of changing the world and touching lives. Cuddling children and bringing them medical care, handing out shoes to the poor in Africa, building a school in Guatemala, door to door evangelism in Europe, running a church service at a new church plant. Not what we’re doing. We don’t see people, and the jobs we’re doing are doing to have to be done in a few months again anyway. It’s not glamorous, no one would really sign up for a missions trip if they knew this is what they’d be doing.
We like serving when it’s something fun, when we can get a good picture from it. But how about when it means standing knee deep in various kinds of poop? Do we have a servants heart then? It’s easy for us to be “selfless” and make “sacrifices” when it’s something that makes us happy, but is that really selflessness? How do we respond when the picture we had of being a missionary is shattered? And we feel like the service we’re doing isn’t really doing anything? Are we still serving God joyfully then?
I’ve been asked before how what I’m doing here is actually ministry, and we’ve been told that we’ll be doing “real” ministry in the Philippines. What I’m doing is real ministry because the Lord called me here to do it. I don’t think that ministry is only working with people and making changes in visible ways. Ministry is when you allow the Lord to use you to make a change for His kingdom. That change isn’t always visible, and it doesn’t always happen within other people, sometimes it’s just within ourselves.
I don’t want to be a selfish server. I don’t want to only serve when it’s fun or when I can see the change I’m making. I want to really serve, and rejoice even when the work is less than desirable. In order for the Lord to use me in whatever way He has planned, I have to be willing to serve in whatever way He has planned. Even when I have no idea why I’m doing it, and when it seems like it’s not helping anything. It requires trust in the Lord and willingness to follow Him in whatever. And that’s what the Lord is teaching me here, in my non-real ministry.
