Meeting With a Missionary

Andrea was already at the coffee shop last night when when I arrived.  6:59.  It's a new environment and foreign neighborhood to her, but she looks like she spends every morning there by the way she casually chats with the barista.

There is something consistently familiar about missionaries.  A distinct air of confident humility precedes them that, combined with a charming openness to people, especially diverse people, is unmistakable.  To a missionary, people of different heritages, nationalities, and worldviews aren't something to be investigated, critiqued or avoided, but encountered with a steady hope that they could know God.  An expectant eagerness lingers that peers in to one's soul, engages, and observes how God is already moving and how they might join in.

There is something else.  Since missionaries typically witness in foreign cultures and environments, they seem to have learned to be at home anywhere, and you can tell.  They fixate on the person and conversation at hand, seemingly unimpressed and completely undistracted by their environment.  It's tertiary.  People and what the Spirit is doing in them is primary.

Andrea, her husband, and daughter are taking respite in the States for the final months of her second pregnancy.  For the last four years, they have been ministering to their students, co-professors, and neighbors in China.  They plan to continue to do so until God says to leave.  This pregnant sabbatical will not be spent void of Christian community for Ann and her family.  They know how precious fellowship is and don't plan to squander a second of it in their time in the States.  So they have jumped right in at Redemption Hill.

Over coffee last night, I was reminded of Janee saying once that God seems to use international missionaries to encourage and commission domestic Christians just as much as we domestic folks encourage and commission international missionaries.  Most of us here in the States will admit to at least one instance of climbing up on our high horses and thinking Aren't I a nice, good person? as we mail our checks and pray when it comes to mind.  Yet, the reality is that the missionaries we send and support are also helping us, inspiring us, challenging us, sending us and enlightening us. 

In a similar vein, researchers predict that within this decade, if not already, the number of Christians in Africa, Asia, and South America will surpass the number in North America and Europe.  Soon after, it's not far fetched to speculate that missionaries will be sent to us rather than primarily us to them.  Times, they are a changin'!

Meeting with Andrea left me refreshed and awake, joyful and inspired, and... thankful.  I'm grateful that though the workers are few and the labor is difficult, God uses us to reciprocally enrich each other as we go.  

He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. Luke 10:2