Me? A Missionary??

I know it's WAY too late for me to be up writing, much less to try to be coherent, but my brain is still hyperactive so just let me ramble for a little bit if that's ok.

Patrick asked me earlier today if I wanted to be a missionary. If you had asked me that question three years ago, the answer would probably have been an easy, "Yes, sign me up!" But tonight, it took almost everything within me to not laugh in his face and say, "Are you kidding me? I've worked alongside enough of you, and for a long enough period of time to know how stressful the lives of missionaries are. Do I WANT to be a missionary? Heck no!"

So what exactly do I want to do, you ask. Well, three years ago you asked me those questions, and three years later, it's still the same answer.

I don't have a clue.

Maybe the loftiest ambitions I have for my life are still overly simplistic because I haven't seen enough of the world to dream any bigger. But honestly, those dreams of working at a little coffee place, running a Bed and Breakfast style of a retreat space, and basically just hanging out, meeting people, listening to their stories and encouraging them to take time to care for their souls... Those dreams from three years ago, they haven't gone away.

If you consider that ministry, then yes. I want to do ministry.

And I know that no matter where I move to, I'm already too culturally messed up to really claim anywhere as my home base. So yes, I want to live cross-culturally - or rather, I don't really have a choice about that anymore.

And if you consider cross-cultural ministry being a missionary, then yes. I want to be a missionary.

But no, I don't want to write reports about how many people I've hung out with, making my new friends nothing but mere statistics, and their stories nothing more than just another project to be filed away in the "prayer request" drawers. No, I don't want people who don't know the stories of my friends' lives to tell me I should spend more time convincing them to share my beliefs just because I am dependent on those people for my meals and living expenses. And no, I don't want to read books or go to "training school for cross-cultural ministry" to learn what it means to live in a new city - I want to learn hands-on from my new friends.

And yes, I do know that this means I will take a lot longer to figure out where the heck I'm going to land after seminary because I don't want to merely conform to the system just so I can get the results. Honestly? Call me headstrong if you would like, or whatever word you can come up with, but I don't care about the results. I don't care if I have coffee daily with the same friend and I don't end up convincing them to share my beliefs.

Because if we think about it, Christ's agape is unconditional. We were created as an expression of his love: a love that existed before - and in spite of - us. And whether we respond to that love or not is our choice. He doesn't try to convince us one way or another - He just loves.

And we think of Hosea - a human example of unconditionally loving his prostitute wife no matter how many times she walked away again. And Hosea was human - how much more then, is Christ's agape? And so, in the frailty of my humanity, that is all that I could possibly offer - agape, not belief systems. Because agape is all that Christ gave me, not my belief systems - those are merely human constructs.

But I also know sometimes if I would just work with the human constructs (like perhaps a sheet of paper that says "Master of Arts"), the little agape has the potential to reach further distances.

And for that reason, I will stick around to work with the human constructs.

But me? A missionary?

You decide.