Will You Be a Missionary?

When I was a kid, I hoped the Lord would not call me to be a missionary. I imagined He might want me to go to Africa where the bugs would eat me and I would get a dreaded disease, and wouldn't know how to talk to people about Jesus anyway, because I didn't know any foreign languages. I thought being a missionary was a death sentence. I knew I should be willing, but I secretly fervently hoped that the Lord would not ask that of me.  (I'm smiling... Didn't I realize that none of my thoughts were hidden from Him?)

These days I know a lot of people who go on "mission trips" to other countries, and I see films of their efforts, struggles, needs, and successes. At this point in my life, I feel I'm way too old to go traipsing off to another country to do "mission work." I'm not at all disrespecting people, even old folks like me, who do that. I'm thrilled there are so many young people with a heart to reach out to people who have never heard of Jesus, who go to school to prepare for that kind of work, and then go and give away their lives far from home and loved ones to tell the good news in a far away place.

I was just reading recently, though, on an internet news site that while "Christianity" is declining in the United States, it is exploding in many other countries in Asia and Africa, especially in places where it is illegal to believe any other than the state religion. Christianity is taking over the world where people are being persecuted, where believers have to hide in caves. From the blood of a great many present day martyrs, millions of new believers are arising. There are thousands of miraculous healings and other miracles, even resurrections from the dead, not just near death experiences, but actual corpses about to be buried arising back to life, and telling of their conversion to Christianity. Wow!

Well, the Lord never has called me to another country (except for a couple of one-day excursions to Mexico just across the border). Yet He has often put me in "mission" situations and journeys inside my own country. For instance, moving to Alaska in 1969 put me in position to reach out a few years later to the wonderful people in the remote villages of Western Alaska. I went several times with a team of ten people from my church in Anchorage , once to Mountain Village and three times to Scammon Bay. We were able to rejoice with the Eskimo Christians in those villages.

I stayed in the home of an old Eskimo woman in Mountain Village, a precious saint. I don't know whether I ministered to her, but she surely ministered to me. She told me stories of her young life, how she cared for her many babies (she lost six out of twelve infants to death), diapered them with seal-skin panties filled with dry, clean moss, and fled from an angry she-bear who attacked her family in a camp. When I gave her the quilt I had made especially to present to whoever I was to stay with, she was silent for a minute, just looking at it. Then she reverently pulled a corner of it up to her face and I could see tears glistening on her high cheek-bones. Finally, she said, "Ohhh. I just told my son... I need a comforter. But you... You brought me a comforter..." She led me to her bedroom and showed me the "comforter" she must have been using for a number of years. It was in shreds, literally. Of the scores of quilts I have made for and given to people in my lifetime, there has never been another one like that one. It brought my heart up into my throat. It rendered me silent for a time. (And that's a big deal, for me to be silent for any length of time.) With her quiet, sparsely worded stories and her tears, she ministered so much more to me than I had to her...

And then there were the three trips to Scammon Bay... I took a cheap electronic piano there and paid more plane fare for it than it was worth new. Eventually, I left it with the little Covenant Church where we held the "singings" in that village.

One of my lasting memories of Scammon was that our team always visited the school and allowed the middle school kids to ask us questions about life in the various states we had lived in before. They seldom get an opportunity to observe the "outside" world in a personal way and ask questions about things they don't understand that they see on satellite television.

One seventh grade girl's question to a lovely young woman on our team was, "Why are your fingernails so long?"

"Uh... I don't know...," looking at her immaculately manicured hands in surprise. "I file them... " She shrugged.

Quickly, the kid offered helpfully, "You could bite them off..." She held her own very well chewed fingers up to her lips as if to show us how to do it, in case we didn't know.

It was hard for me to keep from laughing, but I realized that to the Eskimo, long fingernails get in the way of doing your normal chores like cutting fish or tying nets. Even though she had seen the modern American culture on television, she couldn't relate to what she saw; it was a different world.

As exciting and blessed as were those mission trips, I have found that our Lord uses people who are willing to listen to Him and reach out to the people He puts in our lives, from our own families to our neighbors, to our friends at work, at church, and in school. Now that I'm old, a Grannie and a Great-Grannie, I don't see a great many people every day like I used to see when I worked in an office. Even though there are days when I see and talk to no one except my husband, the Lord shows me how to bless him.

The Lord loves to give us people to love. Will you be a Missionary?