A few months ago the question was posed to me, “What does missions mean to you?” I had a difficult time answering because I found it too significant to articulate easily. As I looked back on the opportunities I’ve had in missions, I realized that it was through missions that I began to understand more of the heart and character of God.
The first time I felt the call to missions on my life, I was backpacking in Peru with my friend Ania, jumping from the colonial majesty of Lima to the highlands of Cuzco to the desert plains of Pisco. It was one of the first times I came up against true poverty- trash in the streets and kids with ragged clothes and snot-encrusted faces, stray dogs, and the thinly veiled stares of men and woman. You can read more about that experience here, but suffice it to say that it was a turning point in my life.
Macchu Picchu
In May of 2010, I went to Afghanistan and served with Sozo International, an organization I connected to through my church in college. We served in a number of capacities, but my favorite was helping to run a health clinic in a refugee camp. There was a young girl there, whose name I'll never know but face I'll never forget, and her grandmother. Both had had their legs run over and suffered from disfigurement and pain. They hobbled around on crutches, crawling, or scooting on their hands. They were given pain medicine, the most we could do in the circumstances, and shown out. I was handed this girl, lighter than most girls half her age, and asked to carry her from the building. Her arms and legs wrapped around me, her head rested on my shoulder. I walked out of the safety of the health clinic into the surrounding crowd of refugees that parted as I walked. I choked to hold back the tears in the middle of this dusty corner of the world, lying in ruins. I didn’t want to let her go.
Afghan IDP camp
The brief moment with the girl broke me. It was a pivotal moment- one girl in a sea of faces of need, hurt, hunger, and pain. In the middle of a hot, dusty day on the other side of the world, in the midst of some of the most difficult and heart-wrenching circumstances I have ever seen, I came alive.
To me, being a missionary is like picking up a little piece of God’s heart from all the corners of the world and carrying them inside me everywhere I go. They’ve been planted in my soul and taken root, growing into something more beautiful and more fragrant than any flower in any earthly garden in all the world. It’s coming against the unknown side of the Lord and having our previously constructed beliefs and ideas blown apart and being left with the broken pieces of myself and others. Trying to rebuild them into what they were before is impossible; I can only construct them into something new and ultimately more lovely. Its finding treasure in the most unlikely places: a trash heap, a mud hut, a school, or the slums.
Missions aren’t about the location, the work, or the end result of a school or a church. It’s about the one. It’s about Wendy, the little girl in Guatemala who can’t walk or talk, but the Lord told me will fly in heaven. It’s about Thao, my adopted sister in Asia who now knows Jesus because of our time together. It’s about Justine, a single mother in Uganda who was kicked out of her home because of her teenage pregnancy, whose son I named Joshua. And it’s about living beyond myself and finding the beautiful riches that are worth sacrifice, pain, sorrow, and difficulties. It’s about seeing the story God is writing in each and every life all around the world.
I went out to change the World and came back to find that the World had changed me.
