A soul half full

When we left the U.S, I never thought I’d be teaching again. I still remember almost five years ago when I turned off the lights to room 269 for the last time, walked down the steps, handed my keys in and hugged my principal. I still remember climbing into the driver’s seat of my car and tweeting something C.S. Lewis said: “There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind.” I instantly missed it. I’ve always missed it. And I can guarantee you if I hadn’t heard in my twenties that almost 40% of the world is still unreached with the gospel of Jesus Christ after 2,000 years (what have we been doing, Church?!) I’d still be in America, and I’d be teaching in the public school system for the rest of my life. And I’d have the husband and the kids and take the family vacations to the beach and make the memories.   

I love teaching. I love common core (yes, common core is good). I love the public school system because it always takes on way more problems than it can solve. And the system gets bashed because it fails a lot (and it does) but you have no idea how much the majority of its employees heap on their plates. Even though the public school system isn’t in pristine shape, America wouldn’t still exist if it weren’t for the majority of principals and teachers who put in way more than they ever get back. 

While we’re in Papua New Guinea waiting to get matched to an unreached people group and form a team to go in and learn an unwritten language – teach through the Bible chronologically, teach literacy, teach HOPE, teach about the God of the universe who calls you to be reconciled with him, creature to creator – we’re helping out other missionaries. 

Everyone oohs and aahs over the troops on the ground in the military. But for every boot on the ground, there are a lot more soldiers behind the scenes who have planned and coordinated and who help things play out as they should. 

It works the same way in missions in unreached places. There are so many people behind the scenes who work to keep the front-line missionaries in the tribe on the ground. They’re called support missionaries. Right now, Nate and I are playing a supporting role to help the missionaries out on the front. I’m using my teaching background to teach English at a school here for missionary kids. Nate’s using his previous web-development career to keep everyone’s computers working for translation and literacy. 

We hope to be matched and ready to move into the bush to work with an unreached tribe in a year. But we don’t know how long it will take; we’ll work here as long as we need to. But what I do know after starting teaching again, is that I love it and it makes me happy. And I could be happy going back to America and teaching again for a long time. But that doesn’t fill me up. As much as I may want it to, it doesn’t. Do you know what I mean? I love teaching, but at the end of the day, my soul is half full. English will burn up when the world does. But souls don’t. What’s the health of your soul at? What percentage of your life or career is dedicated to things that won’t burn up?

Do you guys know that 40% of the world is unreached with the gospel. Still? Some of these people groups have millions of people. That’s ridiculous. Nobody talks about it in the Bible Belt because let’s be honest, who really wants to go. (I don’t.) We talk a lot about missions in the Bible Belt. I’m talking about unreached people groups. Sure, we’ll go on the mission trip and swim with the turtles, but one month tops, and we’re coming back. But what if you went to one of those places where the Bible didn’t exist? And what if you just stayed? What if you just let all the good years of your life play out where nobody would see it? 

A tempurpedic pillow is nice, but a soul resting on Jesus is better. 

How I’m Giving Up My White Privilege

Last week we had someone accuse us of forcing our white privilege and religion on “tribes who have been just fine and happy for thousands of years without you.” We were told we needed to educate ourselves. That’s fine; this has happened before. But I’d like to offer a little bit of education myself after studying tribal people groups for several years:  

Do you know what it’s like to live in a country where the major, advanced cities are considered third world, yet you live in the remote jungles?
Where women die all the time during childbirth?
Where newborn babies are gently placed in high branches on trees outside the village and left to wail and starve and be eaten by predators because there’s not enough food in the garden for another mouth in the family?
Where twins are strangled at birth because one of them is believed to be an evil spirit, but the shaman can’t discern which one, so both must die?
Where mothers listen to their children cry themselves to sleep every night from hunger because the jungle and their small gardens don’t provide enough food?

Where a father can’t give the pig that his clan killed and the fish that they speared to his family to eat, but must sacrifice them to his gods to satisfy their anger?
Where girls are public property of men starting at six years old to be raped at impulse by anyone in the village until they’re married at twelve?
Where people bury their fingernails every time they cut them and hair every time they find a strand that’s fallen out for fear that an enemy will find a piece of their “life-source” and work black magic on them?
Where no one in the entire village steps foot outside their house after the sun goes down for fear of evil spirits?
Where you can’t ever wander outside a geographical boundary because your spirits don’t have dominion over there to protect you?
Where great great grandpa is angry with you and he’s the reason your 2 year old son is dying of malaria so you kill and you burn plants to try desperately to get him to forgive you?
Where children’s bedtime stories aren’t Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, but, ”Hush! if you cry too loud tonight an evil spirit will perch on the thatched roof above us and suck out your insides”?
Where wife beatings are expected and healthy and honorable in marriage?
Where there is no literacy?
Where the government treats you as a piece of trash outcast?
Where all you do every day is try to scavenge what food you can, tend your garden, wail and plead with the spirits to spare your children, listen to your babies cry themselves to sleep at night and wake up and do it all again? 

Does that sound like a people living happily ever after just because they don’t have GMOs and artificial dyes in their food? What if I told you that some of these tribal elders in Papua New Guinea have spent decades just BEGGING for people to come help them? BEGGING to hear of a God who is so very different from theirs who’s not just bent on punishing and maiming and killing them. BEGGING for a chance to escape the abject poverty they’ve been born into? BEGGING for someone to give up their privilege?  

I don’t expect everyone to agree with what we’re doing. But please don’t have the callous disregard to say these people are fine and perfectly content. You are harming them SO MUCH when you say that; you don’t even know. They are illiterate, poor, depressed, literally starving and asking for help. We’re not assuming they want us there. They’re begging us for help. The problem is we don’t want to face true global problems. We want to pretend we care as long as it involves expendable income or expendable time on our days off or painting signs or spray painting our cars or wearing t-shirts or posting on social media. These things make us feel good and make us feel empowering

But moving to Papua New Guinea doesn’t feel empowering. I’m giving up my power! I’m giving up my house, my car, my savings, my parents, my siblings, Thanksgiving Dinner, Erin waking up at 4 a.m. Christmas morning too excited to sleep. I’m giving up ballet for her, a normal education, pool visits in the summer, snowball fights in the winter, trick or treat in the fall, autumn festivals with the cute pumpkin patch photo ops, sleepovers with BFFs, homemade ice cream, soccer and the Y. Do you think I’m giving up all this because I want to shove my white privilege in a small, forgotten corner of the world? It’s the last thing I want to do! I want to stay here and keep my privilege.

But God said to go to the most abandoned areas of the globe.
God said to give up your house and your parents and your roots.
God said I care about these forgotten people that no one else cares about.
God said they’re made in my image and I love them. 

So go tell them.

 

Old Blood

It’s so annoying that missionaries have lots of kids. How dare they. They’re living off other people’s income while they choose to have as many kids as they want.

When we moved to Missouri 3 ½ years ago, one of the professors we first met was super excited to find out that neither Nate or I had come from a missionary family.

“Wow. New blood! I love it!”

The truth is, most new missionaries are kids who grew up “on the mission field” and have missions flowing through their veins from their parents. Nate’s dad is a software programmer and music director at church, and my dad is a theology professor. Our moms help raise babies and kindergarteners. We grew up in America.

I used to feel a sense of pride that this was my choice and I didn’t grow up this way:

 I’m not just being a missionary because that’s all I’ve ever known. I’m not following in my parents’ footsteps. This is my own decision.

But man, how arrogant. How cool is it that missionary parents have had SUCH an impact on their kids that even though their kids have pursued other “normal” career options in America, so many of them have come around to foreign missions with an unreached people group. It’s just inescapable – once you’ve seen an unloved, uncared about, unwanted people be adopted by the God of the universe, how can anything else live up to that?  

And so they come back – the missionary kids who grew up in an unreached tribe. They come back. They had corporate jobs in Silicon Valley; they were moms with picket fences; they were nurses; they were wives; they were teachers, but it just didn’t compare. They couldn’t escape the things they had seen. It was castrated in their souls.

What a legacy to leave.

Today, we’re happy as moms to leave “be kind” as a legacy. I hope I leave my kids with way more than a catchphrase. 

I hope I leave old blood. 

So, my sweet Erin and all my future kids, if you give up your life to find it in pursuit of taking the gospel to an unreached nook of the globe — I’ll just be honored and humbled and weepy. 

You can’t be a missionary because you love people. You will hate the people.

I sat in a little conference room at 7:00 at night in Camdenton, Missouri. It was dark and cold outside. My thick gray coat was still buttoned. 

“You can’t be a missionary because you love people; you will hate the people.” 

The words pinged off my ears like the tiny metal ball in a pinball machine. 

My heart decompressed. It was okay. The guilt didn’t need to be there.

I had always felt like I was harboring some terrible secret in my heart: 

Pssssst. I’m not an extrovert. I don’t have a broken heart for every person on the planet. I just want Jesus, and his heart beats for the nations, and my heart beats for him.

The woman continued to share how the hearts of the people are bitter. They want you there, but they get annoyed so easily; they mock at how stupid you are for not being able to get their language more quickly. They squeal with delight when they successfully pit you against your teammates at who they love more. They steal from you. they team up and take advantage of your kindness. Your anger burns inside you. BUT YOU DON’T REACT. You remember the words that Jesus said to the multitude on the Mount of Olives, “If you are nice to those who are nice to you, what reward do you have? Don’t sinners do the same?” 

So you grit your teeth and love them. 

If you were left to your human nature, you’d leave. Don’t they have any idea what I gave up to be here? 

I could be ___ back home. 

I don’t need to put up with this. 

But you stay. 

Because Jesus stayed. 

You stay when your love and affection for the people runs thin. 

And you stay when it melts and evaporates. 

Jesus is there. 

And you are there because he is there, not because they are there. 

And if you just stick it out, the hate melts like hardened wax. 

And Jesus shatters hearts.

And he dehumidifies minds. 

And the gospel appears. 

And it glows.

And it saturates. 

And it transforms. 

And the people that hated you that you wanted to hate that you didn’t –

Fall at the feet of Jesus, their Creator. 

And the deep chasms of anger suddenly close and you find yourself on the same even plane.

And the fog lifts and you embrace a sister. 

Stay

I’ve heard of missionaries who literally built a high voltage fence around their house so that no tribal people could come bother them. I’ve heard of missionaries who spent DECADES of their lives translating the scripture into another language only to have the printed Bibles literally never read by a single person because the missionaries didn’t spend time with the people to understand their culture and way of communication. I’ve heard of many missionaries who view the people they go to with contempt and disdain, refusing to mingle with the people or give them any worth. 

On the same side of the coin (not the flip side), I’ve heard of many recent missionaries who “love” the people, take pictures with them that they post to instagram (#bethefeet), pass out cold water and tshirts, show the Jesus film, build wells, and become friends with the people – in a matter of weeks. Then they leave on a jet plane, share in church about how souls were saved and lives changed forever, shed some tears and then go back to American life. What’s so important about our lives these days that we can’t sacrifice more than a couple weeks or months for the sake of the gospel? Did we actually really care about the people after all? 

Do you know what the research shows? No lives were changed. No commitments were made. When a white person goes into an impoverished country and through a translator asks a local if they want to accept Jesus, they’re going to say yes every single time. Why? It’s respectful to agree with a rich, white guest in your home. You are showing them honor. They also know you have money and might give them some type of gift for agreeing with them. 

Why am I saying all this? Not to make you mad, but because the largest unreached people group in the world has 134 MILLION and 137 THOUSAND people. Look at all the biblical resources the Shaikh in Bangladesh possess in their language –

Yet literally 0.0% of this people group that numbers 134,137,000 is Christian. How can that be when there are so many resources available to them? 

One of the biggest lies people believe is that everyone is the same. We’re not the same. And until you’ve taken YEARS and sometimes DECADES to walk in these people’s shoes and understand how they formulate their thoughts and reason and deliberate, you can’t reach them at their core with the gospel. You’re irrelevant. You’re out of touch. You don’t get it. 

How to reach these unreached people is to take what the group from the 1800s missed and the millennials missed: relationships. The older generations stayed but didn’t make relationships with the people and so failed to communicate the gospel with clarity. The new generation tries to make relationships but isn’t willing to stay. If our generation would just combine the two errors, we could reach these people: Live with the people and stay. 

When I wake up in the morning in my house in Papua New Guinea in the middle of our village after a night of too little sleep and too much to get done in the day before me, I want my eyes to immediately go to a huge sign in the front of our bedroom that simply has the word STAY. And in my mind Taylor Swift will be singing “All you had to do was stay,” and Jesus will be saying “Just stay, and watch my power,” and I’ll hear Pastor Rich and Pastor Dwight and Pastor Bobby saying, “Just stay. Hang in there. Don’t give up.” 

And I pray to God I’ll stay. 

I pray that getting the gospel to the ends of the earth is what will make my hair turn gray.
And not advanced placement tests for Erin to get into a good school.
And not her clarinet being too expensive.
And not dinner being too high in calories.
And not trying to find a good deal on where to go on our yearly family vacation.
And not the stress of planning the community Fourth of July barbecue.

I want the gospel to be what makes my hair turn gray. 

Because the Lamb Deserves His Reward

Below is an excerpt from the book When Everything is Missions by Denny Spitters and Matthew Ellison.

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We don’t doubt the sincerity and passion of the many proponents of “everybody is a missionary” who want to stimulate evangelism and disciple making in their communities. We appeal to the church, however, for renewed commitment to the biblical, apostolic, missionary model and vision – that the gospel must reach those who have never heard. 

Missionary David Hosaflook has some difficult words for us –

“Paul taught us that the essence of missions is going places where Christ is not already named (Romans 15:20). I don’t understand why church planters so frequently ignore that little word not. Why target the Bible Belt when so many places don’t even have a Bible? Roughly 35% of the world has no access to the Gospel. I’m not talking about the people in your neighborhood who have never heard a clear presentation of the Gospel. I’m talking about the 2.4 billion people who couldn’t find a Christian if they tried. How is this possible? How many of our mission workers are even targeting them? It’s less than 5%. Five measly percent is a yawn in the face of the Great Commissioner, a shrug at the plight of the damned. It’s tantamount to telling the unreached to go to Hell. Forgive my candor, but I don’t know how else to verbalize what our inaction is communicating. We’re passionate about anything other than the harvest fields of unreached souls – unreached not because they are unreachable but because we have chosen not to reach them.” 

You may react to this description of the Church today as overly dramatic, guilt-producing or possibly quite harsh toward the Church. However, if we receive the observation as a well needed gut check and move beyond our positive or negative emotional response, the challenge has significant merit. Have we become delinquent in taking up the honor of the Great Commission? After all, if there is something we want to get right, shouldn’t it be the final words of our Lord’s commission to us as His Church? 

---

 

And they sang a new song, saying, “You are worthy to take the scroll and break its seals and open it, for you were slaughtered and your blood has ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have caused them to become a kingdom of priests for our God and they will reign on the earth.
Worthy is the Lamb who was slaughtered – to receive power
and riches
and wisdom
and strength
and honor
and glory
and blessing.”

– Revelation 5:9-12

“Laura, how were you called into missions?” I wasn’t. Next question.

I grow weary of that question. I grow weary of people being gravely concerned that I’ve never experienced a “divine call.” 

(And by the way, what is so special about missionaries or Christian school teachers or pastors that we say God has a “divine call” on their lives, as if choosing another occupation means you’re less than?)

I’m leaving in a few months to be a career missionary with Nate and baby Erin because…

 duh duh duh duhhhhhh…

It just makes sense. And that’s really as deep as it gets.

I mean, if Christ gave the command to the apostles to go to the ends of the earth and all of those men have died out before making it to the uttermost, and as a result there are entire people groups left who still haven’t heard the message of Christ’s resurrection, shouldn’t I pick up the torch and go tell them? Do I really need a special call? Robert Speer says it best: 

“Christians will pursue a profession here in the United States having demanded far less positive assurance that this is God’s will than it is for them to go out into the mission field. But by what right do they make such distinctions? If men are going to draw lines of division between different kinds of service, what preposterous reasoning leads them to think that it requires less divine sanction for a man to spend his life easily among Christians than it requires for him to go out as a missionary to the heathen? If men are to have special calls for anything, they ought to have special calls to go about their own business, to have a nice time all their lives, to choose the soft places, to make money, and to gratify their own ambitions.

There is a general obligation resting upon Christians to see that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is preached to the world. You and I need no special call to apply that general call of God to our lives. 

This whole business of asking for special calls to missionary work does violence to the Bible. It does violence to the ordinary canons of common sense and honest judgment. There is the command, ‘Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.’ We say, ‘That means other people.’ There is the promise, ‘Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.’ We say, ‘That means me.’ We must have a special divine indication that we fall under the command; we do not ask any special divine indication that we fall under the blessing.

Let us lay aside those shuffling evasions by which the Devil is attempting to persuade us to escape from our duty, and let us get up like men and look at it and do it.” 

A-freakin-men. 

Missions: Organic, Locally Grown and Dead

What’s society abuzz about these days?

Fresh and local.

What’s the church abuzz about these days?

Fresh and local – 

Local ministries done by local believers in our local area. We’ve redefined the Great Commission to be about loving our local neighbor. And we’ve redefined it to the extent that our millions of dollars of missions giving in the church has been redirected to social effort in our communities. 

Loving our neighbor is obviously a command in Scripture.                                                      It’s a good thing.                                                                                                                                 It’s a great thing.                                                                                                                              But it is NOT the Great Commission.                                                                                            And it is NOT missions. 

The Great Commission commands us to go to the uttermost.                                          Section 8 housing in America is not the uttermost. 

It’s the reason why Nate and I and other peers who are going into unreached missions have been denied funding from churches. After 7 months of asking for church support, we’ve only been backed by ONE church. The overwhelming reason: “Our missions budget is used up” or “We focus on our local area first.” Thank God he has used individuals to carry our finances to the point where we have almost 50% of what we need to reach a new tribe in Papua New Guinea. 

Obviously fresh and local is not a sinful philosophy, but it’s a philosophy from the world that Christians have been sold on. When we as the church want exactly what secular society is touting, however harmless it seems, we need to take a step back and evaluate. 

Satan has used something silly and off the radar to deceive us. It’s brilliant, really. We’ve taken a totally amoral societal trend and used it to neglect the Biblical command to go to all the nations. And people are dying and going to hell because of it. 

Remember that Paul told the Corinthians to not be ignorant of the devil’s schemes. 

And before you think that what I’m saying is absolutely ludicrous, just think about it for a second. 

Erin’s Birth

I would say that typically I’m not easily swayed by the crowd, but when I was getting advice about labor from mothers who had been there, I felt like I should listen. I mean, I didn’t want to be that arrogant millennial who refuses ALL advice.

You should do these pelvic exercises this many times a day for this long.
You need to have an advocate in the delivery room with you.
You need to research the c-section rates of the hospitals in the areas.
Your body was made for this; you don’t need any medical intervention.
Do not get an epidural! They cause permanent nerve damage.
Refuse medication. It interferes with your ability to listen to your body’s signals.
Read this book.
Practice this type of breathing.
You need a birthing ball. 

But around the second trimester I thought, you know what, I know myself. I already have anxiety issues, and the more I research, the more freaked out and overwhelmed I feel.  Hundreds of women give birth every day, and no matter how much research or “practice” I do, it’s going to suck all the same. So I’ll just deal with it when I get to that point. 

I stopped googling; I stopped trying to prepare. I didn’t go to any childbirth classes, practice any breathing techniques, watch any videos; I didn’t get any weird birthing balls. I just learned the basic stages of labor and what to expect with each.

At 36 weeks, at my normal appointment, my blood pressure was suddenly through the roof. The doctor wasn’t concerned. She told me to come back in a couple days just to be safe, but it was probably a fluke. 

At 36 weeks and 2 days, it was Nate’s birthday. I scribbled out a few ingredients on a grocery list so I could make him his favorite cake later that day. I ate a waffle for breakfast, went back in to the doctor and my blood pressure hadn’t budged. I squirmed in the chair on the crinkly paper. My sweet, sweet doctor came in and said, “Let’s have a baby today.” 

I cried. 

At 4:00 I went to the 4th floor of labor and delivery at the Forsyth Hospital. They admitted me to a room. I wore an ugly gown.

Nate asked if this meant he wouldn’t get his cake.

I was given blood pressure medicine and some sleep medicine to relieve my anxiety and help me rest.

Early the next morning they started pitocin to get Erin moving.

I watched a couple episodes of Gilmore Girls. The nurse on duty was an idiot, and had never seen the show.

I had always wondered what contractions feel like: It’s just squeezing; but instead of expelling unused blood from your womb like normal every month, your body’s trying to expel a 7, 8, 9 pound body. 

Okay then. 

No thanks.

I got an epidural. 

The pain went away for one contraction. Then something went wrong with the epidural; it wore off immediately on half of my body. I laid on my side and with every contraction sang in my head to my sweet Erin, 

“Hush little baby, don’t say a word, momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird, and if that mockingbird don’t sing, momma’s gonna buy you a diamond ring…”

Time passed. 

Pain sucks. 

The nurse who was supposed to be monitoring my contractions was doing who knows what and had been out of the room for a very long time. Nate finally was able to get her. My contractions were really close, and I thought I might be in the last stage of labor.

Erin was ready. 

I took deep breaths and pushed like the nurse told me. It took a few practices to figure out what “push” actually means. But then I knew. 

The computer monitor stopped working, but I knew when my contractions were happening, and my body knew when to push. 

The nurse and Nate both abandoned me temporarily to try to get the monitor working. I pushed on my own.

An hour later, Erin was born. 

They checked her vitals. 

They sewed me up. 

I needed to pee, but I couldn’t. 

I got a catheter. 

I was wheeled into a recovery room at 11 at night. 

Erin went to the NICU for a couple days and I had to stay in the hospital for a couple more days to wait for my blood pressure to go down.

We all went home.

The end.

Could I have been more prepared? Definitely. But what would have been the point? It wouldn’t have taken away the pain. And I trusted that if something were to go wrong, the doctors would use their years of medical training to make the right decisions for me and my baby. I wasn’t going to bank on my 2 months of research to go against their years of expertise and possibly risk death to me or Erin just because I wanted the birth to happen a certain way. 

For my next kid, I’m not going to do anything differently. 

Having a baby just sucks. There’s no position you can move in or breathing technique you can do or oil you can diffuse to make childbirth an enjoyable experience. Pain in childbirth is a result of the fall, and you’ll suffer through it like millions of women have. And if you’re lucky (and in the vast majority), you’ll be just fine and you’ll both survive. 

My advice: if your personality says “do all the research,” then do all the research. If you want to watch the scary birth videos and attend all the classes, go for it. But if that’s not your style, and you’re more of the “I’ll be happy now and let it suck when it gets here” type, then do that and don’t let anyone talk you out of it. Childbirth is a normal part of life. It’s okay to just let it happen.

Did Jesus Die Five Years Ago?

Story from Ron Yearwood, New Tribes church planter in Africa

Seni Camara was my cultural informant. He was like my village dad. Whenever I needed advice on what to know or do culturally, I went to him. When I prepared my lessons for the chronological teaching, I told it to Seni first and he gave me the words to say so that it could come out sounding like a native Tanda speaker. All the way through, Seni kept saying, “Wow, this message is so true.” As I continued teaching about the promised redeemer, Seni would ask,

“Who is that Redeemer? Is it Muhammad?”

I would respond, “Let’s just wait and see.” After the lesson on Nicodemus and being born again, Seni said,

“I believe this message! Ron, how long ago did Jesus die? Was it about 5 years ago?”

This startled me, so I asked, “Seni why did you say 5 years?” He replied, “Well you came to our village about 4 years ago, so I assume that it was 5 years.”

I said, “Seni…it was about 2000 years ago.”

He looked at me in shock. His mouth fell open; his eyes welled up with tears, and overflowing with emotion, he said,

“2000 years! 2000 years! All my parents and ancestors have died and gone and you all have only just come? Ron, What took you all so long! You waited till we held Islam and it is very difficult for us to change. Why did it take you so long?”

I did not have an answer for Seni.

Seni Camara recently crossed the border into Guinea Bissau to help take the gospel to his birth village with us. A few years ago as we headed home on furlough Seni came to give his farewell and appealed to us to take a message to our churches:

“Please tell your people that my people have not rejected the Gospel. They have not rejected it.” Shaking his head he said, “They have just never heard it. They have never heard it.”