I promise there is a happy ending.
At the end of my first month in Zambia, I began to realize that a fast-paced traveling missions program such as the World Race tends to attract a certain type of individual. This individual is likely to possess some or all of the following traits: extroversion, nature-loving, thrill-seeking, and athletic.
The nature of my first month consisted of a lot of traveling in order to find and meet up with Unsung Heroes. This meant that long bus rides, packing up, moving out, and setting up every few days was the norm. Of course, all this traveling was done together with my team, so you can imagine that as an introvert who gets motion sickness, I wasn’t too thrilled about it; especially when one of these trips (14 hour bus ride and 2 hour layover at 3 AM) was made partly because the team wanted to see Victoria Falls and check out adrenaline pumping activities like bungee jumping and whitewater rafting. Needless to say, the first month left me feeling that because I wasn’t excited like everyone else was about moving around, spending time with people all the time, nature, and adventure, I wasn’t loving my team well. I felt like my team deserved a member who was just as excited as they were about traveling around for ministry and seeing the sights. And because I didn’t have a joyful and positive attitude towards the experiences the rest of my team seemed so pumped up about, I thought that I was burdening them with my inherent reluctance towards doing these activities.
When the second month rolled around, much of the ministry involved sports or manual labor. I hadn’t played sports or worked out since high school. Try as my parents did to get me to play sports when I was younger, they couldn’t do anything about how well I performed in a court or on a field. I’m simply not athletic and I don’t have an athletic build either, so the thought of sweating, running, lifting weights, and being aggressive with my body in a game just didn’t appeal to me. Some of the ministries I did this month included playing soccer, digging holes, hoeing weeds, shoveling dirt, and hauling twenty liters of water from a well half a mile away up and down a hill. So when a large portion of ministry on the World Race required me to be someone I was not in order to excel in performance at the ministry tasks before me, it was pretty easy for me to feel like an incompetent and unwilling minister. On top of all this, the Lord was challenging me to be more sensitive and gentle with my words towards my teammates. I tried to will sensitivity and gentleness into my words through my own strength, so of course I failed and ended up hurting one of my teammates yet again.
At this point, I was in despair over my sin and shortcomings. I was ashamed and left feeling like it was a sin to be myself. I didn’t like the person I was, and I wished that the Lord had made me more extroverted, nature-loving, thrill-seeking, athletic, and sensitive. I wished that He had made me more “World Race appropriate”. I wished that the person I thought everyone (including God) wanted me to be would come out in my reflection. I wished that the beauty I knew my heart should have been capable of displaying was out on display. I wished that the glory I should have been revealing was being revealed through me. I wished that he had made me more loveable and more loving. I was tired of being the worst person at everything with the worst attitude towards everything.
The objective side of me analyzed my failure in being a good minister and a good Christian, deduced that I had made things more difficult and more miserable for everyone so far, and thought that it would be better if I wasn’t here. This was not the position I usually found myself in through ministries or mission trips. Since a lot of the work I did in the past involved less active tasks such as teaching and discipleship alongside people who were familiar to me, I was used to being useful and being understood despite my flaws. I was used to being an asset to a team and not a hindrance. Why would I have any reason to be on a mission trip where I was not doing anything that I excelled in, and if I did do something, I usually made it worse? Why would anyone want me here? Why would God want me here? Even though my teammates continually encouraged me and helped me with the tasks, I felt like I didn’t deserve their kind words or their assistance, because in reality, I was doing such a poor job that it was embarrassing. Everyone else should have just kept to his or her own load and walked past the person who couldn’t handle her own. I felt like I was a broken part that was crippling the rest of the Body, and that I didn’t deserve to be on the World Race. I believed that I was a terrible teammate, squadmate, and child of God. And no matter how many people said that they liked having me here, I had an incredibly hard time believing it. In those few days, the song “Reflection” from the Disney movie “Mulan” was playing in my head (I’m just going to say here that I don’t usually think of Disney movies, and the references to it in this blog sound incredibly cheesy to my normal self. But hey, God’s love can cheese me out sometimes in the best way possible). The heroine sings this song after dishonoring her family by failing to carry out a daughter’s role by ruining her prospects of a good marriage:
“Look at me. I will never pass for a perfect bride or a perfect daughter. Can it be I’m not meant to play this part? Now I see that if I were truly to be myself, I would break my family’s heart. Who is that girl I see, staring straight back at me? Why is my reflection someone I don’t know? Somehow I cannot hide who I am, though I’ve tried. When will my reflection show who I am inside?”
So there I was at the beginning of month two, wallowing in my pride and insecurities, until I realized that I was once again tying in my level of performance in work with my identity in Christ. Pretty much the first thing I surrendered in coming to Christ was thinking that the level of love I received was dependent on how well I performed. Believing this lie was why I had pushed myself so hard to academic excellence in high school, and hated myself so much when my grades weren’t perfect. No longer believing this lie was what set me free. It had been four years since realizing that for the first time, so of course thinking that I still believed this lie even though God had spoken truth into my life over and over again, tempted me to feel worse and sink into the nasty cycle of despair. Thankfully, my teammates and squadmates kept speaking life to me, telling me that I was enough, and that God loved me as I was and where I was. Even at the beginning of the month, my squad coach reminded everyone that the work of God is simply to believe in the one He has sent (John 6:29), and not about excelling in ministries. So in the end, all of my incompetence, failure, and feeling like an ugly, useless person inside out forced me to be dependent on the truth of His love for me regardless of what I said and did, or will say and do. At this point, I’m content in being incapable, because it is because of our incapability that Christ came to save.
Cheesy alert. At the end of Mulan, the heroine slays the enemies and saves all of China. As a result, all of China, including the Emperor, bows down to her. As gifts to honor her family, the Emperor bestows to Mulan his imperial crest and the sword of the enemy. Mulan returns home, kneels down before her father, and presents these tokens as proof that she has brought honor to her family, making her worthy to be his daughter. Her father looks at her, tosses these gifts aside, embraces her, and says, “The greatest gift and honor, is having you for a daughter.”
The picture of the father’s love in the end reminds me that even if I were to save all the souls in China or all the souls I encounter on the World Race, my Heavenly Father would not love me any more or less than the day I left home. Just being His daughter is enough for God to pour out His love upon me endlessly. Thankfully, at the end of my reflection, is His redemption. And in His redemption, the only reflection that exists is that of the perfect and spotless Lamb.
“Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” 2 Corinthians 3:17-18
