This post was inspired by Regan, my gorgeous three-year-old daughter.
We are now “missionaries.” We were always missionaries, but didn’t know it.
Missionaries were those people dressed way out of date that came to your church with a bad slide show. They normally weren’t very good speakers and they had really bad hair. They also rarely spent much time talking to people like me. They just did their song and dance and then disappeared again. To somewhere. Some place like the deepest Congo. Or a place where piranhas were waiting to eat you. Or, well, some place that I just knew God would send me if I really followed His voice and became a missionary. (**To all my dear full-time, long-term missionary friends: This is a caricature of what I remember from my youth and college days and not intended to be read as applicable to any one person!) 🙂
Now that we are missionaries we see that most people think of missionaries exactly as we did. (I guess it could be my hair.) What do you think the most common question asked of us? It is either “Where did you go?” or “Where are you going?” And, you can tell by the look on their face that they are expecting to hear something like “China,” “Mongolia,” or “Uganda.” When we tell them we have been to Hawaii, Arkansas, England, and the Philippines, only the Philippines even registers. And they probably notice that my shirt has a stain on it. 🙂
I could say something cheesy like, “Missions is about who you know, not where you go.” Or I could point out that we are all called to a ministry of reconciliation now that we are reconciled to God. 2 Corinthians 5. But, I think Regan spot on hit it with our conversation this morning on our way to our post office box. Allow me to let you in on the conversation:
Regan, you know we are going to go away on a big plane again soon. Do you want to go?
Yes.
Where do you want to go?
I want to go to see Cindy.
Cindy who?
You know, Cindy. Her in England.
Oh!
Regan knows what ministry and missions is all about. It’s not about places or performance. It is about loving people and seeing those people come to an intimate understanding of a loving God through the blood of Jesus Christ.
