Tag: missions

A Letter to my Pastor

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Dear Pastor,

It may have been a while since we’ve seen each other. I live half a world away in a home and on a continent probably much different from yours. I’m ‘your missionary,’ and your church has helped to send me out to distant nations with the good news of the gospel. I love my job, and I’m so thankful for the church’s prayers and support, but I have a favor to ask. 

Will you pastor me, too? Even though I’m thousands of miles away; even though you don’t get to see me every week; even though I may be more complicated than your average church member? I know that you have a lot on your plate, because I experience that in my ministry too. And I know you likely struggle with seasons of burnout, because I’ve had plenty of them too. I know this is a big ask, but I think there are some biblical reasons for me to ask it. And when it all works out in the economy of the Kingdom, I have a suspicion that we’ll both be the better for it. 

When Paul was sent out as a missionary in Acts, we see many times in those narratives and in his letters that people visited him in prison, or cared for him in illness or need. Some brought him a cloak when he was cold, ministered to him when he was wounded or sick, or took up an offering to send him on his way. Others even came to visit and carried personal messages from him to the churches, and from the churches to him. Though Paul was geographically distant from these churches for much of his missionary work, they still cared for him from afar, and above all held him dear in their prayers.

I need to be shepherded. Some missionaries find groups of believers who pour into them and nurture their spiritual growth, just like Paul had communities of believers in the places he traveled through. Some of us have mentors on the field and people walking beside us in their work and ministry and life. But not all of us do. Whether from lostness in our area, isolation, or cultural differences, many of us lack and crave someone from our passport country who knows us and cares for us like a pastor cares for their church members. I completely believe that above all, the Lord is my shepherd, and he is sufficient for all my needs. But I also believe that he meets those needs through the hands and feet of our Christian communities around us. 

Just as you would visit or call people in your congregation when they’re sick or broken-hearted, can you send me an email or give me a call? If your church is good at remembering birthdays or sharing recipes, or meal trains, or however they serve the community, will you do something similar for me? Some things are harder overseas, but if I’m grieving and you can’t send me a meal or sit with me in person, many places overseas have apps for meal delivery systems; there are apps for video chat; and apps that can immediately drop money in an account to cover the extra expense of a meal so I don’t have to prepare for myself. If your Sunday school ladies would prepare a care basket or send a card to someone in my situation, would you check with me about mailing something too? Will you extend your church counseling services or Bible studies or even your streamed or recorded Sunday worship and sermons to me too? 

When Paul was originally sent out as a missionary in Acts 11 and 13, he was first mentored by Barnabas, chosen according to the Spirit’s direction, and then sent out with fasting and prayer. The Church knew him—his calling from the Lord, his strengths and gifts, and his weaknesses. And when Peter closed his first letter, he instructed his hearers to ‘greet each other with a kiss of love,’ not far from the “holy kiss” that Paul recommends closing both his second letter to the Corinthians and his first to the Thessalonians. Intimacy is a word we Baptists often shy away from. But the early church modeled it as they met together, shared meals, met each other’s needs, and prayed together. They knew each other closely and counted each other as dear brothers and sisters. 

I need to be known. I’m not asking you to greet me with a holy kiss. But I do want us to share the intimacy of dear brothers and sisters. You know me, and you have shepherded me before. You have the ability to help ground me in specific biblical truths you already know I struggle to remember or believe. You remember what I’m like when I’m healthy and unhealthy, when I’m abiding in the Lord and when I’m not. You know my passions and callings, my strengths and spiritual giftings, and you know my weaknesses and thorns in the flesh and perennial temptations. But you also know what I love, what makes me tick or brings me joy, even when my new culture may have crowded out those hobbies. You have the ability to remind me who I am in Christ and what the Lord says of me, even (and especially) when I’m stuck in language learning, or the enemy whispers lies about my ability to be a light in a dark place. 

When Peter, Paul, James and others met in Acts 15 and 21, when Paul recounts a disagreement with Peter in Galatians 2, and when Paul and Barnabas did not agree on which members should be on their missionary team, they very clearly challenged each other in love and called each other to account. As church leaders in different regions, they didn’t always have an eye on what the others were doing, but they shared their updates and praised the Lord for his work together. They mutually encouraged each other and mutually called each other out—all for the benefit of the Church at large as well as their own obedience to the Lord. 

I need accountability. This one can be tricky, because often you won’t have the context to know my place of work well enough to instruct me or guide and direct my ministry. But you know as well as I do that stepping into a ministry role doesn’t make your walk with the Lord suddenly above question. I’m no ‘hero missionary,’ and my soul didn’t fundamentally change in the move overseas so that it doesn’t need an outside eye on it. Just as you do, I need someone asking if I’m routinely spending time in Bible reading and prayer. Just like you do, I need someone to call out sin in my life, even and especially if I’m in any position of authority or spiritual leadership. I am nowhere near invincible in my spiritual walk because I’m a missionary. In fact, just like you, I can often struggle the most when the Lord is at work in big ways and the Enemy will do anything in his power to derail that work. I can just as easily fall into the trap that my exhaustion and striving will build the Kingdom in my own power and timing instead of the Lord’s. Will you check on me in season and out, to help make sure that I am always ready to give an answer for the hope that I have, that I am continually working out my salvation with fear and trembling? 

And this is where I come full circle. We need each other.

We need to sharpen each other. Just as you can sympathize and share many of my struggles in ministry, I can know and share yours; as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. As we both study the Bible and learn to apply it in our different contexts, what the Lord teaches us and what we teach others can help strengthen both our personal walks with the Lord and our ministry. I do not ask you to encourage and speak truth to me when I struggle without being willing to do the same for you. As the body has many parts, so does the Church have many members. Your mentorship and wisdom as a spiritual leader can often strengthen my ministry, and there are times too when my ability to cross cultures and engage people ‘different’ from myself can strengthen your church and ministry too. 

Dear Pastor, as we both walk through jobs that don’t have typical ‘office hours,’ that can easily stretch us into thinking too much of our own ability to help others without the power of the Spirit, that can feel lonely or isolated, that give us platforms to teach the Word—we walk very similar roads. We are all one body united by God’s grace, and so we have much to give each other, and many ways to bear each others’ burdens. So, can we encourage each other together? Will you commit to know me and my work as I commit to know you and yours? Will you walk with me, even if it’s to the ends of the earth?

Yours, humbly,

            —a missionary

Waiting for the Romanian Month

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Here in my journey with God, and at this moment in my life, I feel like I’m standing on the brink of something unimaginable — on the cusp of two different lives. I don’t only feel this way in this exact moment; I’ve felt it for a while. It’s like a chapter in my life is ending, as hackneyed as that may sound. I feel like I’ve been reading this chapter for about a year now, and while the plot wasn’t moving very quickly at the beginning, I’ve flipped the page and read down to the last couple of lines, afraid to flick my eyes across the spine to the last page. I’m afraid to know how many lines are left in the chapter. Once I know that, I have to read on, and afterwards the book closes and I have to open a new one. This book has lasted for twenty years, and it’s been my constant companion. It has held my stories and my interpretations and my prayers. Once it’s over I’ll hardly know where to begin again. The anxious thought playing in a loop in my brain is that I do  know how many lines are left — 2 months and 29 days. In two months and twenty-nine days I’ll board a plane in Bucharest, Romania after an anxious, sad, and numb ride to the airport and the mechanical routine of going through security. When I board that plane I’ll fly to Amsterdam and distractedly catch a flight to Dallas while trying to tame the raging sea of thoughts and emotions and fears. I’ll have just experienced a month in Romania, and I can’t shake the feeling that that experience, more than just about any other in my life, will shape its direction. Boarding that plane I’ll jump off the brink and fall and fall until something catches.

God called me to vocational service to him as a ten-year-old. I don’t really remember all of the particulars, I just knew at that point that I couldn’t imagine a life spent doing anything else but sharing the gospel and loving people far from my own home. God has refined that call through the years, sometimes gently and sometimes painfully. Some days I’ve had the prophet Jeremiah’s case of incurable ‘heartburn’ and some days I caught Jesus’ leaky eyes from standing too long and looking out over Jerusalem. More often than not those ‘inconveniences’ have been so uncomfortable I’ve buried them under a schedule, hard work, and not enough sleep. But there have been those times when I spent a whole summer serving food and clothes and Stories to Hispanic people like Jésus in inner-city Houston. And those times when I fingered the curls of a Pott-Lincoln county DHS girl whose face was covered in spaghetti and told her with all of my heart and a lot of Someone Else’s that she was beautiful. And those times when I told Stories — to children in Sunday School, kids I babysit, five-year-olds from Houston who could barely understand my English, and DHS kids from Shawnee. All of those times I saw light streaming in from a button-hole in the tent I’d put up around myself to ‘protect’ me from my calling. That chink of light fell on me each time and reminded me that this was my calling, and no matter how much I wanted to hide from it and hide from the times when the little girl with the curls started to cry, and the teen wouldn’t listen to the story, and Jésus took his food and clothes and disappeared into the crowd — no matter how uncomfortable those times made me, I couldn’t hide inside a big fish like Jonah forever.

A year and a half ago I spent about a month in a remote part of the Amazon Jungle in Peru, living and loving and sharing my faith with a native jungle tribe. It was a journey of faith, but while I was living in probably one of the most isolated places on the planet I felt more deeply connected than I ever have. I was with a handful of people who could speak my language, loving a village of people who couldn’t, and serving a God who understood the words in the villager’s hearts and in my own better than I will ever be able to. Far from feeling isolated I felt deeply connected. I allowed that chink of light coming through my tent to come in through the tent flaps and bathe me in the light of my calling and living in God’s will.

As meaningful as all of those experiences have been, I still feel like my trip to Romania will carry so much more meaning. I told a dear friend at one point that I had an idea of what falling in love felt like, because I couldn’t think of anything else but the trip and the people and God’s work. I was giddy with excitement. Even still that giddiness hasn’t worn off. After praying hours and hours of prayers and sending out what felt like a  million letters and speaking at churches and raising $3385 and buying the plane tickets and purchasing supplies for the trip, I still have moments of breathlessness. ‘Oh-me-of-little-faith’ can’t believe how faithful God has been, and I still tear up over how honored I feel to be God’s servant in a place like Romania. As Gladys Alward said,

I wasn’t God’s first choice for what I’ve done for China… I don’t know who it was… It must have been a man… a well-educated man. I don’t know what happened. Perhaps he died. Perhaps he wasn’t willing… and God looked down… and saw Gladys Aylward… And God said – “Well, she’s willing.”

I wasn’t God’s first choice for Romania. He had probably picked someone smarter and bolder who at least knew how to make a sentence in the language. God didn’t find me equipped, but He did find me willing. I still become short of breath at times because I can’t believe that I will actually get on a plane in 61 days and fly to the Roma people, who desperately need God. I’m afraid to breathe too hard for fear that things will fall apart because they feel to good to be true.

I told you earlier that I felt like I was on the cusp of two lives. I mean that I feel like the Caroline who comes back from Romania will not be the same one that left for Romania. As much as I have grown or hidden from growth for these past twenty years, I have the feeling that God will do a wonderful work in my prayerfully obedient heart in that Romanian month that will change me for a lifetime. Maybe he will unquestionably indicate a call on my life to the Roma people. Maybe he will change my Jeremiah’s heartburn into a third degree burn from the outside that destroys my insides so much that they have to grow back, like Isaiah’s refined gold. Whatever He does, I feel like I am reading the last sentences of the last chapter in a book. When I close the back cover I don’t know what will happen. Yes, I’ll go back to school, and then probably to seminary and eventually to a mission field somewhere, but those are only the outside motions—the first few seconds after jumping off the cliff. What I need to know is what’s at the bottom. That is what I mentioned before that was unimaginable. The blessing of it all is, though, that indeed I don’t know what’s at the bottom. One of my favorite verses is Ephesians 3:19-20. It says:

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

God will do more than I can imagine in Romania, and I give Him all the glory for it.