Clearing Stumps

Written: Saturday, February 28

I don’t have a really good handle on what it means to be a missionary.  I haven’t been on any other missions trips, I’ve never talked in depth with any missionaries, and I haven’t even read many missionary biographies.  I think when I started the World Race I had a vague idea of preaching in tribal villages and rescuing children from garbage dumps, leading worship in underground churches and feeding orphans – and of course there’s all the incredible stuff you can read about in the blogs from previous Racers.  I have to admit, I was a little excited about a missions trip that grows your faith so much that you actually do lay hands on people and heal them, that you actually encounter and drive out demons, that you shake off the bites of poisonous animals without harm – all the exciting stuff you find in the book of Acts.  It seemed a little crazy to me at the time, but I’ve already learned I can’t limit God to just what I think He’s capable of or interested in doing.  What I didn’t expect was the last two months.

I have yet to knock on a random door and introduce myself as a missionary, let alone encounter a divine appointment or meet someone where they’re hurting the most.  I have yet to see God perform miracles through my hands, or see the sick made well instantly through prayer.  I haven’t seen any visions, I haven’t spoken in tongues, I haven’t even preached a message yet.  And there’s a part of me that thinks, “Wait.  What’s going on here?  Aren’t you here to be God’s vessel to the hurting and hungry of the world, to show His love and power in unmistakable ways and to turn hearts and minds towards Christ?  Why isn’t that happening?”  And it’s true that I feel silly sometimes calling myself a missionary when after two months I haven’t seen even a single soul commit to the gospel of Jesus.  I could get very frustrated thinking about this, if I dwelled on how my own expectations aren’t lining up with my experiences.

The thing is – and this is something both so incredibly important and incredibly obvious I can’t believe I didn’t understand this at the start – being a missionary isn’t just about handing out tickets to the pearly gates.  Yes, Jesus did indeed preach repentance as the core of His message, and yes the absolute most important thing anyone can do on Earth is accept the gift of salvation, but there is so much more that is necessary between saying to someone, “Hi, I’m a missionary” and walking them through a sinner’s prayer.  I’m reading a book by Richard Stearns, president of World Vision, called “The Hole in our Gospel” and he takes note of how the work of evangelism is often compared in metaphor to farming.  This is particularly apt considering what I’ve been doing this month.

Instead of all the stuff I expected being a missionary entailed, I’ve been planting corn.  By hand.  I’ve planted bananas with no tools other than a machete.  I’ve chiseled down a concrete pillar using a mallet and a sharp piece of rebar.  I’ve played soccer and basketball and volleyball and duck-duck-goose.  I’ve sung at church in English and Spanish and clapped along to the songs in Quichua.  I’ve painted a house in the rain.  I’ve mopped up after and played with and loved on three small children who have no concept of respect for personal belongings and who communicate almost exclusively by whining, and I’ve stayed inside and sung along to iPod worship when the rain is pouring down so hard you can’t even hear anything, much less go outside and work.  The one thing I’ve done that really stands out among all the jungle walks and rainwater showers and rooftop bus rides was the hour I spent early one afternoon with a machete, up at the farm.  This is not what you think of when you think of a farm.  It honestly looks more like the aftermath of a clear-cut lumber operation – stumps and fallen logs are everywhere, and there is nothing that looks like anyone would ever want to come back to here – but here is where a family grows the food they put on their table for dinner. That morning we had planted all the cleared land, and in order to get at some more ground to plant seeds before the planting season ended we had to cut back all the ground cover and brush that had grown up since the last harvest.   I was hacking at the brush, cutting out around stumps and removing the plants that would get in the way of the planting, and I remember thinking that this was an awful lot of work for zero return.  I’m going to be halfway around the world when these corn plants are ready to harvest.

So let’s go back to Rick Stearns and his farming metaphor:

It took me a while to put this all together, but tonight as we were eating hard-boiled eggs in the house of a woman from the church, all the pieces finally clicked.  We had been invited out that afternoon to a complex of four large houses, where an extended family of over thirty people lived, for volleyball and soccer and fellowship in the large central courtyard.  One of the ladies there was a woman many of us had commented on over the last three weeks – she never spoke to us, never acknowledged us even with a smile or a nod – and we were a little discouraged.  Ignacio told us that the women here are like that culturally, and it is not easy to get close to them, but we were still concerned that we weren’t really having any positive impact here.  Tonight Shida said that she had been sitting next to that woman, and she was smiling and talking and asking questions and being a genuinely engaging person.  What a marvelous change God had made in this woman to finally encounter us as someone she was comfortable talking to!  When we came here, we were concerned that we might not be able to overcome the prejudices against Americans and missionaries that seem to be quite deeply seated in this community – that gringos are weak and don’t want to work, that they prefer to help with money rather than time or effort, and that they come and leave and don’t ever want to come back.  Now I can clearly see the ways our time on the farm, working and serving in the church, and just being involved with the community has softened their hearts toward us.  My hope and prayer is that God will continue to open these people to receive His emissaries – perhaps even other World Race teams – and that the stumps we’ve been able to pull from their hearts will clear the way for seeds to be planted, nurtured, and eventually harvested to the glory of God and His Kingdom.