How I was called to the mission field (pt 1)

I remember laying in bed as a child and praying, ‘Lord, please don’t make me a missionary and send me to Africa’. It’s pretty amazing how things can change.

 

Our story resumes during spring break of my senior year in college – March 2007. During my first three years of study, I used spring break as an opportunity to go to Florida with my family and a good friend. We laid on the beach by day and explored a few clubs by nite; it was always a relaxing and fun time. By my fourth year, though, I was ready for something different, and I heard about a five-day kayaking trip on Lake Powell in Arizona. Our twelve-person college group included two of my good friends from Campus Crusade for Christ, and they became my tent mates (I discovered how amazing an MSR Mutha Hubba is). During our trip, I felt my sense of adventure awakened, in a way I hadn’t experienced since childhood vacations to northern Minnesota and Canada. Several times during that week, I found myself staring at a foreign world of red rock, pinkened by each glorious sunset, in awe of God’s creation. 

 

My short trip to Lake Powell inspired me to embark on another adventure with the same college organization: a twenty-two day getaway to New Zealand’s south island. It was a bit of a graduation present to myself, and our group departed the day after Christmas in 2007. This was my first time outside of North America, and I wasn’t entirely prepared for the experience. Although I had seen the Caribbean very briefly on cruises during my early teens, I was now able to immerse myself in another country, and see things through my own lens that was crafted during high school and college. I saw a world very different from the one I knew in America – not better, not worse, but different. I met people who had come from all over the earth to live in this beautiful land, and I met others who had crossed thousands of miles to travel it. I saw in New Zealand a different life, if only for a short time: the life of the nomad. But every way of life has its own consequences.

 

When I returned home to the ‘States, I had two voicemails from a recruiter about a job in Iowa. I did some research on the company, and I was impressed by what I found. It was a growing Fortune 500 corporation, and the skill set and industry knowledge I acquired during my internships fit very well. I wasn’t overly excited about moving to a town of 10,000 residents, but my sister’s future husband has brother who lives there, which was encouraging. When I went in for a pair of interviews, I took note of a soda fountain in the lobby, 24-inch monitors at every engineering workstation, and a General Manager who stopped by to look me over. I felt like I was interviewing at Google. I was sold. It also didn’t hurt that I would be joining a very knowledgeable and cultured team, and I would have an opportunity to be mentored by each of them.

 

During my first six months in Iowa, I found that I wasn’t completely sure about my surroundings…even after I got my own apartment, I was hesitant to furnish it and make a home. Although I enjoyed my job and the people I was working with, it was my first time living alone, and I wasn’t being as diligent about getting ‘plugged in’ to my community as I knew I needed to be. A bonus of this job is that it was within three hours of my family – a quality I hadn’t found in other opportunities during my search for employment – and as a result, I often found myself traveling back to Minnesota for something to do on the weekends. Although I always enjoy spending time with my family, it was obvious I wasn’t yet fully committed to growing in my new life.

 

One nite during my first summer in the Hawkeye State, I was on the phone with a good friend from college, and I began  describing to her the feelings I had about not being sure of my decision. She told me about a book I had to read, by an author named Shane Claiborne: ‘The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical’. I ordered the book from Amazon, and upon receiving it, I promptly found the perfect spot for it on my shelf. While I was confident my friend knew my heart, necessity is the best motivator, and there was another force at work within me: getting back to that feeling of ‘home’.

 

I specifically recall one nite a short while later, I was taking a bike ride around town, and I stopped to rest on an old railroad bridge. As I looked around me – at the old movie theatre, the quaint brick buildings of the main street, the black sky that easily overpowered the lights of the small town – I remember thinking ‘I could live here for a while’. I had come to a crossroads. I had finally made my decision. And so, I began buckling down for the long winter ahead. I bought some furniture and a proper bed to sleep on, and I noticed my relationships began to feel like something more real and rewarding. Of course, while I was feeling more comfortable, God’s plan remained the same, as did its timeline.

 

That fall, I remember hanging out with a friend at my place, when a conversation led me to tell her about ‘The Irresistible Revolution’ – or at least, as much as my friend had told me. Seeing as I wasn’t currently making good use of the book, I encouraged her to borrow it. She decided to get started right away, so I went out to the garage to do some wrenching. When I returned, she was on page sixty, and tears covered her cheeks. Uhhh-oh. Maybe this was the real deal. A short while later, she was another hundred pages in, and she told me, “If you read this, you’re going to quit your job”. She, too, knew my heart, and despite my newfound security, she apparently understood my conviction. While I was quite inclined to maintain my ignorance, my experience told me no good comes of avoiding God’s voice. Besides, it was just a book, and I had no way of knowing if God was even trying to reach me through Shane. I had been hiding from those three-hundred-fifty-eight pages long enough.

 

When I finally began reading ‘The Irresistible Revolution’, I was shocked. I was confronted by a group of young people who had been brought up as ‘normal’ Christians like me, but now they were sleeping on the streets with the homeless, inviting drug addicts into their home, and fighting for the rights of people who most of us casually ignore. As much as I could recall from my knowledge of the Bible, they were living the way Christ instructed us to live (“those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick”). My first initial thought was, ‘they do exist! There are Christians today who are serving in the same way as Christ’s disciples did 2000 years ago’. Later, when I stopped reading, I was humbled. The hole in my life was highlighted. I no longer felt very special, just because I looked like some kid who had it together once.

I was most of the way through the book when my dad and I took a trip out to Michigan to visit some of his family. One of my cousins had recently returned from a three-month trip to Kenya with Adventures in Missions, and I had a chance to talk to him about it. As he shared with me, I could see in him the same passion and love that Shane wrote about. Somewhere during the time he was comforting orphans or enjoying the hospitality of a Coca-cola in a local’s shack, the compassion that hides within most of us had found its way out of him. Kenya was a part of him now. As I listened, I felt my eyes grow larger, my breath grow deeper. By the time he told me about The World Race, my ears were fully open. Eleven months of living out of a backpack, with other young Christians from all over the country, united for the same purpose: surrendering a year of their lives to God, and allowing themselves to be used by Him as he reveals the journey. I was immediately intrigued, and I wanted to do it.