What I Learned From a Summer Among the Unreached

As I walk down the streets of North Africa, cars zoom past me, horns honk, street vendors call out to sell fruit, and dust kicks up in the air. I don’t know the language spoken here, and I currently have Google Maps pulled up to figure out how to get home. 

Discomfort is an odd thing. It unveils itself in joys and happiness, in ordinary moments, even when we think it is only reserved for the sad ones. I’ve grown accustomed to contradictory feelings all at once here. 

While I loved the things in the place I served, I also often felt exasperated, searching for any feeling of home. The goodness was muted, even in my joys, because there was no familiarity. 

The hardest and most wonderful part of doing overseas work is the utter dependence on the Lord that it requires. And that begins before we ever leave for the field.

MISSIONS AS ORDINARY LIFE

If I learned anything from my mentors on the trip, it was this: Mission work is ordinary life done intentionally and cross-culturally. Missionaries are normal people. They want to sleep in, they go to the grocery store, and have family time in the mornings. It’s all just done in a different context. 

Sure, they work at a church plant, but the pastors at our home churches live normal lives too. Missionaries are faithful believers in a new place. They are people who live on purpose through choosing to disciple and be faithful members at the church. This is something that we as believers should be doing wherever we live.

DEPENDENCE ON CHRIST IN EVERYTHING

If you aren’t already living in ordinary faithfulness at home, it’s going to be more difficult to do it overseas. Being in a new place with no familiarity is going to make you want to hide away in your house. When you’re hot and sweaty after a really hard language class and still have to meet with someone one-on-one, followed by a big group event that night, the only way to get through is through Christ. It is hard to express how much I spent praying during the day as I did daily tasks. What a comfort it is that in a completely new environment, I had an unchanging, familiar God to lean on. 

THE LORD IS ALWAYS WITH US

God really is always present beside us. When I was meeting with women, the Lord was with me, even when I felt unqualified. I was the youngest on my team, and the people I served were usually a decade older than me. It was nerve-racking. 

But there were breakthroughs. Once, when my teammate and I had a group of women over for a book study, one of the ladies expressed confusion. She said she didn’t understand why we still sin when we’re made new. She asked, “Do you just have to be made new over and over again?” I was overjoyed to share the gospel with her. She was truly thinking about the Word. That’s all we can hope for with our ministry. 

Our hope shouldn’t be that we change people, but that God’s Word is making an impact on them. Then all we can do is pray that he might soften their hearts to believe. Remembering that God is sovereign over all I said and did with the women I met this past summer was quite freeing. We weren’t called to be perfect in our going, but to go and let God do the rest.

We must depend and trust that he will carry us through it. And he will.