This Serving Jesus Thing

“Because it’s uncomfortable and difficult and I don’t want to,” I said. That’s how I was feeling, so right or wrong I said it.

He just looked at me, knowingly, patiently.

It looked easier in the missionary biographies and blog posts, this serving Jesus thing. More adrenaline filled and more close the pages and fall asleep comfortably in your own bed at night after a nice relaxing meal with your family and maybe a good TV show or two.

But playing it out in real life has meant dying to myself and repenting of my selfish heart and opening up our home and being poured out every. single. day.

And now it meant opening up our home to this young couple because we felt—knew—that is what God was saying to do.

It was easy when they were just this young couple who had a baby in the middle of nowhere with nothing and I could just start a program and get some blankets and bottles donated.

It was a little harder when we had to stop our lives three times a day to bring him healthy, vitamin packed meals so that his body could stand a chance against this illness blackening his lungs.

It was more challenging still when the baby was hospitalized and multiple trips to the nearest city and the clinic didn’t seem to bring answers.

And try as I may to think of all the reasons why this isn’t a good idea, the truth is that it is a good idea and, in fact, it’s exactly what this discipleship thing is supposed to look like.

Sure, we can work to relieve their physical ailments and send them back to their tribes with healthy lungs and healed bodies. But isn’t that just treating the symptoms, not the illness?

So, we have taken them in under our own roof. For [at least] two months we will live in front of them, live with them, teach them, learn from them.

Become friends with them.

Because you expect a lot of things when you move your family to the Amazon jungle.

Bugs. Heat. Rain.

Somehow, though, you never anticipate the lonely. Our house is full of people all the time. All the time it’s full.

But there is still the loneliness of a new culture. No one who speaks your heart language. No one who understands your culture.

So some time ago I asked God for a friend.

And as I look into the eyes of this sixteen year old girl and mother of one, I realize what she must be going through. So far from her own culture, her own people, her own language with a baby to raise.

Just like me.

So we share. She tells her stories and I tell mine. Two different worlds coming together in our second languages. She’s ten years my junior and from a world more primitive than I have ever seen but there is this friendship that is being built.

I teach her to read, she teaches me to cook. I hold her baby and she holds mine.

And somewhere in there we both try to find common ground in this loneliness that comes from a foreign land.

That’s when it hits me that we are all foreigners in this land, but we are brothers and sisters in Christ. Then loneliness starts to fade and hope shines through.

And it’s two steps forward and one step back every day as I lay aside my preconceived ideas and let go of the cynicism that creeps into my heart and I lay down my pride and I allow myself to be the student and not just the teacher and I speak the truth in love, but also hear the truth with humility.

Then I realize that sometimes the answers to our prayers are found right smack dab in the middle of the uncomfortable and difficult.

And this serving Jesus thing starts to look just like it’s supposed to.

When It's Hard

“You’ll find that everything is an emergency,” she said, almost mockingly. “There are other places that they can go for help, though. It’s best not to let people in your home. It needs to be your place to rest. In the villages, Indians aren’t allowed into the missionaries’ homes. They can meet with them other places, but not in their homes.”

I tried to track with what she was saying, but somehow it didn’t sit right with me.

Then she gave the usual advice about setting time frames for people to come over, “being careful”, and not getting “too involved”.

But something in me said, “That can’t be right…”

This came from a missionary who has been doing this for several decades and I wanted to believe that what she was saying were words of wisdom. I wanted to believe that I could separate myself from the needs around me. Compartmentalize if you will.

I wanted it to be that easy.

But somehow when that brown hair, brown eyed girl that you love with fragments for teeth and those same tattered clothes comes over to your house with a tummy ache and throws up in your floor and then crawls up in your lap to be held because her mom and dad don’t care an ounce about her, you just can’t seem to find it in you to say, “Sorry, this is our home where we rest. You can’t come in.”

And when you have an Indian Pastor from a two day canoe ride up river come to you with his family of eight and tell you that they are in town for the night with no where to stay and his wife and two daughters have malaria and his 73 year old mom is sick with something and his niece and nephew have a hacking cough and God provided for you to have medical training to care for these very things and you have two boxes full of medicines and the means to treat them and extra mattresses and more than enough food, you just can’t find it in you to say, “There is this clinic for Indians you can go to. You’ll have to sleep on the floor there and they probably won’t know what to treat you with and will send you away with nothing to eat, but we can’t get ‘too involved’.”

Then when six kids show up hungry for breakfast almost every morning in the same clothes they wore yesterday (or completely naked as is the case with the youngest) because their dad is always drunk and their mom works to pay for his drinking habit and her party habit and leaves her kids to fend for themselves, you just can’t seem to bring yourself to close the door and say, “This is our family’s meal time. I’m sure someone will feed you.”

But I wish I could sometimes.

I wish I could just close our doors to the reality of the world we live in with the sick and the hurting and the lost and the lonely. I wish I could pretend I didn’t know about that sick baby or that man with Tuberculosis or those little eyes watching pornography because they live in a one bedroom 200 square foot house with their drunken parents.

Sometimes I’m tired and I don’t want to answer the door. And if I have to break up one more fight over the crayons and explain one more time why we can’t live off of candy I might go crazy.

Sometimes I don’t speak in love and I forget to give grace.

Sometimes I fumble all over my words as I try to explain in my third language the why behind not stealing, not lying, not hitting and the only Person who can make us good.

Sometimes I lie in bed awake at 2am because our neighbor’s blaring music is literally shaking our wooden house and feel like I must be the worst parent in the world because between the laundry that I’ve been trying to dry on the line for three days because of the rain and the little mouths to feed and the half a dozen unannounced visitors and the three trips into town, I forgot to take a moment to stop and look into my own little boy’s eyes and see his needs.

And I laugh when I remember how I thought that selling everything and moving to another country away from family and all things familiar was the hard part.

No. The hard part is the dying to self every day.

Because if we don’t allow ourselves to be poured out and broken, we never learn to lean on the one who was poured out and broken for us.

If we close our doors and our eyes to the needs around us for the sake of comfort and ease, we close our hearts to the transforming power of the Holy Spirit who wants to renew our minds and make us more into the image of Christ.

So, yes, many times we will tell the neighborhood kids that play time is over and send them home because our own kids needs some one on one. We will say no when we are asked for money for the non-essentials. Every now and then we will “run-away” to the nearby city to get some quality family time and uninterrupted rest.

But we will continue to feed bellies and clothe bodies and wipe tears and teach truth and disciple new believers and encourage old believers and bandage wounds and pray for the sick as long as God gives us the means by which to do it even when it is uncomfortable and we’re tired and the water tanks are dry and we all four have to pile up in one bed because the other four mattresses are unexpectedly occupied.

And our doors will remain open.

We don’t always want to do it. And we don’t always do it right. And we are still learning. But He never said it would be comfortable or easy. And He never said to be safe or to not get too involved.

It’s hard.

But it’s in the hard that we are made like Him.

“We give no opportunity for stumbling to anyone, so that the ministry will not be blamed. But as God’s ministers, we commend ourselves in everything:

by great endurance, by afflictions,
by hardship, by difficulties,
by beatings, by imprisonments,
by riots, by labors,
by sleepless nights, by times of hunger,
by purity, by knowledge,
by patience, by kindness,
by the Holy Spirit, by sincere love,                           

 by the message of truth,
by the power of God;
through weapons of righteousness
on the right hand and the left,
 through glory and dishonor,
through slander and good report;
as deceivers yet true;
 as unknown yet recognized;
as dying and look—we live;
as being disciplined yet not killed;
as grieving yet always rejoicing;
as poor yet enriching many;
as having nothing yet possessing everything.”

2 Corinthians 6.3-10

Beautiful

Their laughter carried through the walls of our wooden house as though I were in the same room with them. They didn’t know I could hear them or they probably would have stopped. They’re shy like that.

I smiled.

Just two weeks ago it wasn’t the sound of laughter that filled our home but their baby’s desperate gasps for air as she clung to life, trying to overcome the very illness that had killed two others in her tribe.

They giggled, she and her husband. The same man that just a month ago lay emaciated in the hotel room after we sent the fast boat to pick him up from his village. He was almost dead when we began pumping him full of vitamins, preparing his body for the treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis.

Now the baby girl, six months old today, was kicking her little legs and smiling as Mama and Daddy played with her.

Their laughter. Her smiles. Our home a place for them to find rest.

The journey was hard and they still have a ways to go. But it’s beautiful.

Thank you Jesus.

Beautiful

Their laughter carried through the walls of our wooden house as though I were in the same room with them. They didn’t know I could hear them or they probably would have stopped. They’re shy like that.

I smiled.

Just two weeks ago it wasn’t the sound of laughter that filled our home but their baby’s desperate gasps for air as she clung to life, trying to overcome the very illness that had killed two others in her tribe.

They giggled, she and her husband. The same man that just a month ago lay emaciated in the hotel room after we sent the fast boat to pick him up from his village. He was almost dead when we began pumping him full of vitamins, preparing his body for the treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis.

Now the baby girl, six months old today, was kicking her little legs and smiling as Mama and Daddy played with her.

Their laughter. Her smiles. Our home a place for them to find rest.

The journey was hard and they still have a ways to go. But it’s beautiful.

Thank you Jesus.