MISSIONS
by Deanne Legler
Missions. A word that is so simple and yet so full of possibilities. When I was growing up, missions held the thought of exotic lands and people with heathen customs and National Geographic images. There was a romance to the thought of living among something so foreign.
I would think of the family living in Africa supported by my home congregation. Every few years this family would come to the states on furlough. Each time was a wondrous treat. The congregation would huddle close to the projector to see the pictures of the bush and house monkeys, glowing fungi that is worshipped as a God and undriveable roads. All of the young of the congregation would smash in together on the floor in the one and only aisle and listen as the missionary would talk about school for his four children outside in a one room shack with a dirt floor and baptisms that were occasionally postponed because of water animals that could snap you in two. We would all then head to the fellowship hall in mass to look at the entire family dressed in traditional African dress and dare to try a bite of native food. We would ask simple questions and “oooh” and “aaah” in amazement over the life the family chose to lead so far from our small town in so many ways.
When I was in college the word “missions” was just as exciting and just as mysterious as when I was the little girl watching the Africa pictures flash across the sanctuary screen. All the mystery and distance that had encompassed missions was very soon to fade into the background as I found my own Christian walk.
I was looking for a church home my first year in college (not with much speed or enthusiasm as my options were limited in a small town and I was asserting my new found independence) and I went to a church that I had attended a few times as a high schooler in the youth group. This church was outside of my normal cultural boundaries and while I had attended it in the youth group, I had never attended as an individual. The church service was lively and the sermon passionate. I couldn’t tell you what was spoken in the service but I can tell you I was about to make a paradigm shift. I looked around with a judging heart and saw flawed people living sinful lives. It was how hypocritical it all seemed and then I thought, these God fearing people are up front with the sin they have and come because they realize they need Jesus. They weren’t coming because they were perfect. They came because of their imperfections that only God could change. They didn’t try to hide the worst parts of themselves because God knew it all. Their heart was in the place where God can use them to show unchurched others that Christians are not perfect but forgiven. That congregation knew something that I was on the edge of finding out.
As I was leaving the service I looked up at the back wall of the building. It was an old brick building with very little adornment. The back wall had two things on its shabby surface. One was a cheap plastic dollar store clock and the other was a very simple piece of old dirty white poster board that had faded black permanent marker writing on it. The poster had one sentence. A statement that was evident to me was the heart of the congregation, “You are now entering the mission field.”
From that moment on, the thought that you had to live in a remote part of Russia or China or Africa to be a missionary was no longer a part of my thought process. Missions were real, everyday living right there in small town Gulf Coast south Texas. I WAS A MISSIONARY. I was a missionary from the moment I confessed that Jesus was the one true savior of the world, the son of God, part and parcel of the Holy Spirit. From the moment I came out drenched, sputtering and smiling in the murky stagnant baptistery years earlier, I was a missionary. I can’t punch my time card in the pew every Sunday and think I have done my duty. I have to live out my faith. I have to walk the walk and talk the talk. AND if I mess up, I cringe, feel shame, ask for forgiveness and move on. It’s what makes me human and what makes me approachable to the unchurched. Not one person I know is perfect or sinless and if the rare person should come along who think they could be my Savior’s equal of sinless perfection then they are arrogant and puffed up. A missionary/Christian isn’t perfect, we just try to realize that the sin in our life keeps us from God and we TRY to mess up less. I had just made the connection that a missionary/Christian isn’t some pious goody two shoe that lives a million miles away, but every imperfect, amazingly loved by God, sinner who has turned their life over to Christ. Not only did the thought occur to me that the missionaries I had idealized in my youth had real lives, but real problems, real families, real worries beyond the even the work they are called to do in a foreign land surrounded by a different culture. The missionaries that invoked romantic images in the short time on furlough had ministries that did not always elicit the response they anticipated and converts that often made their work more difficult to reach out to others. These missionaries were human, imperfect just like me.
I now realize that mission is such a huge word that rarely receives the respect and placement in our lives that it deserves. We have relegated missions to a job description of a select few within our brotherhood, a short term trip to do a great work or a term to describe a committee of people. That congregation I attended awoke in me the thought that I am a one person mission, that each Christian is a one person, bring Jesus to the masses, mission. So I say with passion: Take your candle, Go light your world!