Check out Part 1
Safety in mission is a relative impossibility, rather
implausibility.
My dad told me just before I trounced off to Egypt for a
summer, “I know you’ll be safe, ‘cause you’re in the center of God’s will -- but
I guess that’s not safe, it’s just right.”
We can’t embark on mission and expect to come out the other
side the same. We’ll be changed; we’ll be effected by what we’ve seen, whom
we’ve spoken to, and the relationships we’ve built.
If we informally understand safety as the retention of
normality than we must never see mission as safe. (And more often than not when
we, as modern Americans, talk about safety we mean the normal.)
Internationally I’ve been in some rather dangerous
experiences all for the sake of mission (things I’ve not told my mom… until she
reads this that is), it wasn’t safe. Locally I’ve been in situations just as
hairy.
My point is this: mission will never leave us the same. It won’t
allow us to be just as spunky as we were when we were kids. It’ll wear our
souls out and cause us to be ragged and rough. It won’t polish us up and let
us be the neat little Christian legalism has told us we ought to be.
“The Prince of Darkness grim, we tremble not for him;
His rage we can endure,
for lo, his doom is sure,
One little word shall fell him….
Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also;
The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still,
His kingdom is forever.”
Life is a tempest, which will drowned our tiny boats
eventually. We are not as we once were; we are not children anymore. No, and
the cares of life have brought us the realization of reality. So why should
mission be different? Why should mission cause us to be clean and neat and safe when it
asks us to do precisely opposite?
No. No, mission isn’t safe, and we’ll not come out the other
side of it the same. Thank God.
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