If You Live On An Everyday Mission Field

I always wanted to live on the mission field.  

 I wanted to travel to faraway places, to take the gospel to people who had never heard.  I wanted the adventure, the passion, even, the sacrifice.  I thought that surely this is what God would have for me.  He would have wanted this, He would have made a way for me to go.  But when I married, two weeks after my 21^st birthday, it only took me a short time to realize that missions were the farthest thing from my husband’s life agenda.  Not because he doesn’t think they are important but because … he doesn’t travel well.  He hates eating anything remotely resembling foreign food.  He is just not the missions type and missions is not his ministry calling.  And I soon realized that moving to the mission field was not an option. 

We’ve been married for almost 15 years now, and not much has changed.  There are no plans to become missionaries in Ecuador or Mozambique or Thailand.  Just life in suburban Midwestern America with six kids and… something else.  

Ministry.  Surprising ministry. 

Ministry to the most and least and ministry when you least expect it and ministry when it’s most inconvenient and everyday ministry. On an everyday mission field.

Ministry that I prayed for and waited for and hoped for and when I least expected it, overtook me like a tidal wave hitting the Costa Rican shoreline.  

And this past year that wave crashed, flooded over my life like some kind of crazy that I’ve never known.  

People with lives so unbelievably broken, so hurting, so overwhelmed by life, thrust into mine, crying out for help.  

The woman who lost her teenage son, who battles a depression so deep she can’t get out for bed for weeks at a time.  

The teenage mother who grew up one of eight kids to almost as many fathers, who saw her addict mother trade flesh for cash and thinks that this is how women survive in this busted up place.  Thinks this is how you get out of the ghetto, get the “good life” in surburban America, by becoming the food for lust-hungry eyes of sin-strangled men.  Desperation can make you do desperate things.  

The boy who gets bullied every day, who said he was going to kill himself, I find him lying facedown on my driveway in a puddle of his own making, choking though the sobs that he’s afraid he’s going to be an orphan; his mother already abandoned him.  

And the boy who told me at spring break he’d rather go to church with us than go to Florida because it’s boring there and church with us is ‘the most funnest thing ever’.

And I am ashamed to say there are days I want to quit.  There are days that I think that if that doorbell rings one more time I am going to fully lose the last shred of mind that I have left.  And there are days that I want to say my own crazy six are enough here and do I really have to throw wide the door for ten more again today?  Do I have to pack the big van full, every time I leave the house?  Do I have to talk broken kids down from the drama that they live and shouldn’t have to be living and how do you be Jesus on this everyday mission field?

You start by remembering that there is no ‘have to’ in Christ but only Thank You. 

And this is my Thank You, my opportunity to tell the world that Christ indeed is raised from the dead; that He rescues, that He saves from death and sin and He did it for me.  He did it for me.  He did it for you.

And this everyday mission field is my place to say, Yes Lord, you’re worth this.  Yes, Lord, you are worth laying down my life, my time, my convenience, my money, my body to bring forth life, my hands to serve the least, my words to encourage the desperate, my prayers to sustain the weary.  And this is no jungle mission field, but there are those who live right next door who are desperate and dying without hope, without Christ, and will I lay down my life for these on this suburban mission field and do the hard things and make the sacrifices and share what I have, Christ, my very life. 

Because this is no jungle, but all of life is a jungle without Christ and I know what it is like to be lost in the thick of it.  I remember what darkness feels like and how can I not hold out the lamp to those struggling to find the way?  

Because He said “Go and make disciples” and sometimes you go to your kitchen table and sometimes you go down the street and sometimes you go over oceans but we all must go and it’s this everyday disciple-making that matters.  This telling of the rescuing salvation of Jesus to our kids, to our neighbors, to those close and those far, this is what we are called to.  It can be easy to overlook the everyday ministry of the everyday mission field.  The one you walk right where you are. 

 But if Christ’s love compels us, then here, and everywhere can become mission.

This is my spiritual act of worship on an everyday mission field.  And this is exactly where God has ordained for me to serve Him, this place of everyday mission.