Are you married or have you ever been married? If you have, then you have experienced something that helped prepare you for the work of a missionary. The cultural experience of the first time you spend extended time in your in-laws home, the mixing of cultures in your own home between you and your spouse, and the blending of families by marriage with your spouse’s brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, and the like presents all the difficulties one can experience when crossing into another country’s culture.
Sure, you generally don’t have the language barriers you might face in a foreign country (although that isn’t entirely a given if a Southerner finds him- or herself with inlaws from a place like Boston), but you do discover that not every family cooks the same way, eats the same way, dresses the same way, believes the same things, watches the same movies, reads the same books, likes the same sports team or same forms of entertainment, and so many other things. Clean doesn’t mean clean; dirty may not mean dirty; spicy may not mean spicy; the list ends not.
So, this is a shout out to everyone who has gone through the blending of families. You may not think you have experienced much that would prepare you to go to another country to share the gospel of Jesus Christ, but if you have been through all that a marriage brings with it, and you desire to follow Jesus wherever HE leads, I’d say you are more than ready to take a leap into cross-cultural missions. You’ve had to learn reconciliation and peacemaking. You’ve committed to relationship. Combine that with the ministry of reconciliation God has given you to the world and you’ve got a match made in Heaven. 2 Corinthians 5:14-21.
As Jesus once said, “Go” for it.