During our debrief time in Livingstone, Zambia, we all spent some time asking our Lord for a word for these last five months of the Race. I was meditating a lot on what it looks like to rewire my brain to look more like Jesus. I felt like I was caught in old habits and mindsets that were keeping me from walking in the fullness He has for me. And, as I was meditating on this, I realized that that’s not actually my job. Rewiring my brain is on Holy Spirit! So, I started to instead ask Him to rewire me. To show me how to let Him do that work.
“Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its desires and do not offer any parts of it to sin as weapons for unrighteousness. But as those who are alive from the dead, offer yourselves to God as weapons for righteousness. For sin will not rule over you, because you are not under the law but under grace.” – Romans 6:12-14
Trying in my own efforts to rewire my brain is like trying to rewire the electricity in my house all by myself. There’s no way I can get it right! I have no training on how to wire lights and power outlets and all the other tech that resides in the walls of a home, so why on earth would I think I could do that on my own? Holy Spirit is the perfect and capable electrician, engineer, craftsman, or whatever other metaphor works for you, of our minds and hearts. To do this on my own is not offering myself as a “weapon for righteousness”. Instead I’m sitting in the blacksmith’s shop trying not to bang my thumb with my hammer as I attempt to mold a weapon. Meanwhile, Jesus is waiting at the door of the shop, fully armored up and saying “Come on, it’s time to go into battle! Just let Me take care of it – trust Me!”
As I thought on this verse in Romans 6 and on what word God had for the rest of my World Race, the phrase “live like heaven is here” kept popping into my head.
What does it really look like to live like heaven is here? Obviously, we are on earth, not heaven, and I’ve never physically been to heaven, so how could I even begin to imagine what living like heaven is here means?
Bob Goff – a Christian author and speaker – is a diplomat for the Republic of Uganda. Because of this, he flies the Ugandan flag above his house. The really cool thing about this is that wherever the consul lives and the Ugandan flag flies, it’s technically Ugandan soil. Pretty crazy to think that there’s a little piece of Uganda in a neighborhood in San Diego, California, but, there is. I’m telling you all this because it makes me think about living like heaven is here.
Our Lord tells us that we are citizens of heaven – and we are citizens right now. That’s where our passports come from, that’s where all our mail is sent, that’s the place we can call home. One thing that has become an unexpected reality while on the World Race is that I am representing a bunch of different entities as I travel around the world. I’m representing Adventures in Missions, the United States of America, and I’m representing God. People’s impression of me changes their perspective about all the things I represent. If I spend five minutes in Amsterdam and the only people I interact with are rude and inconsiderate, then I’ll go back home and tell my friends that everyone from Amsterdam is unpleasant. The same is true for the impression I have on others as I travel.
Now, if my ultimate and eternal citizenship is in heaven, then everyone I come in contact with should be stepping onto international soil. They are encountering a diplomat of heaven and their impression of me impacts their impression of heaven.
Jesus told His disciples that people would know Him through the ways they loved each other. It’s not because of all the theology and eschatological realism you can spout out. It’s not because of how good we are at playing eye-spy with sin. It’s because meeting a follower of Jesus should feel like meeting Jesus.
Being on a mission trip for 11 months makes you think a lot about what impression you are having on the people around you and about what reasons you’re even serving in this way in the first place. In his latest book, Bob Goff talks about missions in a way that is too good to paraphrase:
“I’ve known some remarkable and courageous missionaries. Perhaps you have too. But for many, when they think of missionaries, they think of Spaniards with chest armor, a galleon, and the flu – and then all the indigenous people die. Instead of saying you’re a missionary, why not just go somewhere to learn about your faith from the people you find there and be as helpful as you can be? The neat part about most of the people I know who go on ‘mission trips’ are already doing exactly that. We don’t need to call everything we do ‘ministry’ anymore either. Just call it Tuesday. That’s what people who are becoming love do.”
Every interaction we have with people is impactful in some way, and they can happen anywhere on earth. From asking my cashier how her day is going to helping a woman carry jugs of water to do her laundry to listening to our care point Shepherd share about her life, becoming like Jesus just looks like loving people. That’s the most impactful thing we can do. We can do it in the villages of eSwatini and we can do it in the subways of Philly – wherever our God has called us, that’s where we should be spreading that international soil.
Adventures in Missions has this great saying that goes “life is ministry and ministry is life”. I think AIM and Bob Goff have the same idea with some slightly different phrasing. When life is ministry and ministry is life, every day and every interaction is a ministry opportunity. Or, as Bob would call it, Tuesday.
What does it look like for you to live like it’s Tuesday? What does it look like for living like heaven is here to be a reflex rather than a constant choice?
grace + peace
If you’d like an in-depth look at what our ministry in eSwatini looks like, check out my teammate Taylor’s blog. All the Bob Goff references in this post are from his book Everybody, Always.
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