It has been a while since I last wrote a blog. I’ve been to Laos and I’m currently in Northern Ireland getting ready to leave for Romania. I’ve been a part of New Life City Church here in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and it has been such blessing to see a dedication to minister to a divided community that most of these leaders were raised in.
Seeing this dedication to the community had me thinking about my reason for applying for the World Race. I wanted to be a part of missions, and I wanted to give, teach, and love. I thought, this would be crazy, traveling the world and learning the cultures and ministering to the peoples in foreign nations. Many of my family members, friends, and neighbors thought the same thing, they thought that it would be crazy of me to leave everything behind and go. The only problem lay in my thought process. When Jesus told the rich man to sell everything he had and follow Him, it broke the rich man. Jesus calls us to give up our goals, our dreams, and our aspirations.
C.S. Lewis phrases Jesus’s call in another way, “Give me all of you!!! I don’t want so much of your time, so much of your talents and money, and so much of your work. I want YOU!!! ALL OF YOU!! I have not come to torment or frustrate the natural man or woman, but to KILL IT! No half measures will do. I don’t want to only prune a branch here and a branch there; rather I want the whole tree out! Hand it over to me, the whole outfit, all of your desires, all of your wants and wishes and dreams. Turn them ALL over to me, give yourself to me and I will make of you a new self—in my image. Give me yourself and in exchange I will give you Myself. My will, shall become your will. My heart, shall become your heart.”
My goal was to try and find the most radical way of submitting to God and make a difference in the world, but what if the craziest thing I could do wasn’t to leave everything but, perhaps, staying? The idea we have to take from the rich man is this, Jesus knew where his heart was, and He was seeking to change it. That heart is different in every man and woman, though. Jesus is not out to make sure we are not tied down and can leave on a moment’s notice. This is a point I think me and maybe my generation have confused. We see Jesus calling people to follow Him and we see their weakness as the things holding them back, so we caution ourselves not to become too attached to anything because Jesus may call us to leave it.
Maybe the heart He is trying to change in my generation is our uncommitted attitude. We want to travel from place to place, we want to attend a church when it’s convenient, we want to not be tied down by a 9-5 job. Maybe the most radical thing we can do is get a 9-5 job, surround ourselves with a good community that we invest in, embrace what it looks like to live with and work with and love people that surround us in our every day lives. Maybe we need to commit. Commit to attending one church every week possible. Commit to staying in a community. Commit to changing our town, city, neighborhood, or cul-de-sac.
I write these things to encourage local missions, not to discourage foreign missions. You see, just as in school, we have to understand the entire curriculum taught to 3rd grade before we jump to the bigger and better material of 4th grade and certainly before we arrive in 10th grade, how can we seek to minister to the last, the least, and the lost 5000 miles away if we can’t minister to the last, least, and lost in our own neighborhood?
