Wilderness

I have the kind of life where I don’t see people for years, and if they are very good friends, we drop back into our friendship right where we left off, and all the time in between disappears. It’s rich visiting.  My friend Kath, who moved away from this area five years ago, drove hours to come see me, and we tucked ourselves away in a booth in Conversations Café and caught up. Kids. Husbands. Jobs. God.

And we got to talking about what happens when you move away. I’ve moved away to Mexico, and she’s moved away to “up north,” but we’d both come up against the same experience of what she’d call wilderness, when you leave behind the support structure that makes Christian life and Christian ministry life easier, and you try to live without all that.  I’d been struck by this idea especially hard a few months back at a missionary retreat, and it was all coming back now. At the retreat, one of the women that shared works for a mission agency, a hopping, vibrant center of some 20 employees who are constantly seeing God’s handiwork all around the world. She’d gotten a promotion into a brand new ministry job in the agency. She described it as a door opening, unlooked for, and all she had to do was walk in. It was wonderful.  I think this is the kind of experience God wants for all of us, and it’s what his body is meant to provide.

But I had realized with a pang that it was not my experience. And it was not the experience of several others of the missionary wives in the group. We were going through a wilderness. Doors didn’t just open. Opportunities did not drop in our laps. In fact, we were wondering how to use our gifts when the structure for using our gifts just wasn’t there. Our husbands seemed challenged enough, but we were not, and nothing seemed to be changing. Prayer wasn’t opening doors.

Sometimes prayers don’t open the doors we want.  We have to wait. Maybe forever. These are hard times. In reading Matthew now, I’m impressed with how often Jesus mentions people just doing ordinary jobs faithfully: “A faithful, sensible servant is one to whom the master can give the responsibility of managing his other household servants and feeding them” (Matt 24). I think we forget that around the world, most Christians don’t have the ministry opportunities that exist in North America. They can’t raise money to go on short term mission trips or volunteer at a homeless shelter. In much of the world there are neither the resources nor the infrastructure for this kind of freedom and choice, although because of our experience in North America, we come to expect it as a given.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities for serving others. These abound. It means that our brothers and sisters in other places often have to take more initiative, be more creative, and be far more sacrificial to get things done. There’s no organization handing out brochures, signing up newcomers, taking donations. And sometimes in our rush to help, we jump in with our ready-made organizational efficiency and stifle what believers in the neighborhood could do.  They start thinking nothing gets done unless it comes in from the outside where all the resources are.

It’s hard to leave your culture. And part of North American culture is having so much choice, and so much opportunity, and so much variety, and so many resources to get things done, and so much rich organizational efficiency. These things you leave behind when you live in Mixtec mountains, and you trade them for an awareness of what makes martyrs. And you trade them for the patience to stand in the hot sun, with grit in your mouth, for five hours, bumping around in the back of a truck bed with twenty other people, just to get home for the evening. And you trade them for one enormous, handcrafted tortilla sandwich of young black beans and red-hot salsa, and the unstudied generosity that handed you this feast.