One of my favorite quotes this month happened during house cleaning. Elaina was mopping up the hostel floors and apparently wasn’t working fast enough, so the housekeeper was instructing her to just douse the floors in water and move on.
As they were discussing the various mopping techniques, one of the older volunteers showed up and loudly exclaimed, “What is a mop?” (Remember, dear readers, Aussie accents.)
“A rag on a stick…?” Elaina replied, completely bewildered.
“Exactly,” Dennis said, “a rag on a stick. You have to apply pressure, otherwise it’s completely ineffective.”
The whole event was quickly turned into a collection of quotes that we repeated for the rest of the month. But, as funny as it all was, it’s an important question.
What is a mop?
It’s not a broom, it’s not a vacuum, it’s not a sponge. If you try to use it as any one of those things, you’ll probably end up making a bigger mess than you started with. To really clean your floors, you have to know your tools and use them the way they were designed to be used.
What is a missionary?
She’s not a maid or a tourist or a convenient babysitter, though of course she can assume those roles upon necessity. But if that’s all she does, she’s both missed her calling and been, to quote our gentleman friend, “completely ineffective.”
A missionary is someone who has a mission. In this case, the mission is to go into all the earth and share the good news that, although our sin has condemned us to hell, God has made a way for us to be reconciled to Him through His Son, Jesus Christ. Anything less than that is, quite honestly, a waste of time.
So a missionary is preaching the Gospel to the ends of the earth… that includes North America. Just because we aren’t over crowded with aboriginals and HIV orphans (but we certainly have our share of the poor and desperate) does not mean our society has any less need to be redeemed. In fact, I think that we almost need it more.
Missionaries, then, preach the Gospel to the whole world, including their hometown.
Who, then, is a missionary? Am I a missionary? Yes, but not because I left behind family and friends to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth. Remember, a missionary is simply someone with a mission.
Christ called the whole church to preach the good news to the lost.
That means all of us.
Coming home next month doesn’t mean that I cease to be a missionary, it just means that my mission field will cease to be the bush of Africa or the bars of Asia or the villages of Eastern Europe and will become the university I attend, the people I buy coffee from, the families I re-enter.
Being a missionary isn’t about having a seminary degree or a team of financial backers.
It’s about loving your neighbor enough to share the love of God with him.
What is a mop?
It’s a tool used to clean floors.
What is a missionary?
It’s the church, God’s bride, the beloved and redeemed people He called and created by name, it’s you and me and it’s time that we realize that we are also tools.
Time to wake up, church.
The world is waiting.
“I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for the harvest. Even now the reaper draws his wages, even now he harvests the crops for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together.”
John 4:35-36
