Today’s Readings: Ezekiel 3-4; John 9
You are not being sent to a far away nation with an unintelligible language. I am sending you to the people of Israel. But if I had sent you to foreign peoples with unintelligible languages, surely they would listen to you. But the people of Israel will refuse to listen to you because they refuse to listen to Me. As I told you, the Israelites are a hard-headed, stubborn-hearted people.
Growing up in my church, missionaries would often come and talk about what they were doing in places like Africa, South America, Central America, and Asia. We would sit on the edge of our seats as they told stories of lions and tigers, spiders and huge lizards, natives and warrior tribes in all those exotic places. All of us kids, intrigued by the stories, wondered what it would be like to live on mission fields for God.
My sitting on the edge of my seat was always tempered somewhat by my experiences as a missionary’s kid, however. My dad served on the mission field for a couple of years when I was five and six years old. We lived in Panama City, Panama. Not exactly the jungle, although we drove through it from time to time going from one side of the isthmus to the other if we wanted to go from ocean to ocean. It’s the only place in the world where you can see the sun rise in the Pacific Ocean and set in the Atlantic Ocean while standing in the same country, by the way.
Most of our missionaries actually live in large cities, I discovered as I grew older. They, like my dad, took trips into the jungles, outback, or whatever the wilder areas of the country were called, but their place of residence usually had a metropolitan address. Lots of reasons for doing that. First, politically, it’s hard to keep all the documents current to remain in a foreign country as a missionary if you live away from government seats. It’s also hard to secure the equipment and material to help people if you live with the people who have no resources. The resources must come from those who have it. Communication with home is almost impossible in those remote areas and sometimes missionaries just need to get a letter home or a phone call to a friend to get through the next month. Mostly, though, missionaries live in large cities because that’s where the majority of people live! If you’re going to share God’s word, why not share it to as many as possible.
Something interesting happened in my denomination a few years ago. My international denomination officially declared the United States and Canada mission fields. We sent missionaries around the world for decades, but somehow forgot that we lived in a place with 300 million people who needed to hear the gospel just as much as those in Africa, South and Central America, and Asia. In fact, seeing the degradation of behavior in our country, several of our foreign churches had already sent missionaries back to the United States to spread the word among our people about what tremendous change God can make in the lives of those who will dare to follow Him.
God gave Ezekiel the same assignment. Missionary assignments to foreign lands may sound exciting and often we might worry that God will call us to go across the seas to some place we can’t even pronounce the name of the country. But more often than not, like Ezekiel, He will ask us to just share His word with the people around us. He asks for missionaries at home, witnesses to His amazing grace.
Join me next time, won’t you?
Richard
Walk with Me 