While in Thailand a person on my squad made a comment that stuck with me throughout the month, it was “what if we changed it from going to work but going to ministry?” (this was about our ministry site which was us working in a Café).
This got me thinking about how much my perspective would change when at “work” if I just called it “ministry”. I mean how quickly of a mind shift it is to think “I am not going to work, I am going to ministry today. I am going right where God wants me to be so that I can spread His kingdom.” For me this blew my mind and I could not stop thinking about it, of course I did question if it be reasonable in an everyday life? Is that something possible? What would it even look like?
Fast forward to Malaysia…and since God answers all questions he took this month to answer mine.
While in Malaysia we helped at a pop up shop for Village Artisan (look them up they have a great story), a youth summer camp, helped clean a guesthouse for other missionaries to stay at, prayed at the Penang House of Prayer, and did a lot of ATL (Ask the Lord). This month we got to witness what a community of missionaries can look like and what is like to live life together. Our host (Jessica) did not have the expected career of a foreign missionary, which some people assume is the person handing out water day in and day out, feeding the hungry, or constantly evangelizing to those they see in the streets. Nope, she was a missionary by just living her life exactly where God called her to be, she would go to the prayer room and worked as a nanny. That to me is what real ministry is. Her ministry is living her life and just having God at the front of her mind. She and her friends in Penang showed me how simple and broad the term missionary is. Sometimes a missionary is the person screaming God’s name on the street corner, or passing out water and food to the hungry, or running a school for refugees, but sometimes God calls us to just live a “normal” life with him at the front of our minds.
So be proud of yourself because we are all missionaries God did not call a few of us to be missionaries he called all of us to be missionaries for the kingdom. Our walks might look different but we should want to share the good news to every person we meet.
“Disciple making is not a call for others to come to us to hear the gospel but a command for us to go to others to share the gospel.”
-By David Platt from Radical
