I Blew It

I had the perfect chance, but I checked out instead.

I got the usual small talk questions as I sat across the table from my coworker while we supervised the adolescents on our unit.  "Are you married? Do you have kids (statements usually coupled with follow up phrases like, ‘Really?  You’re too pretty to be single,’ or, ‘Oh, usually when you meet young, Caucasian females who seem to have it all together, they’re married.’  Thankfully, this guy just let it go).

“So, are you planning on doing this job for a while?” he asked.

“Not forever,” I responded.  “I'll be leaving to go do missions overseas in a little less than a year.  I'm be going to Thailand with a team for 5 to 7 years, and we’ll be church planting.”

“Oh.  I don't really know what that means.”

“Basically, we’ll be talking to people and telling them about Jesus and how great He is, and then they’ll tell their friends, and then… churches will form.”

I said something else in Christianese that I can't recall now, something unintelligible to the untrained “churched” ear.

“Oh, that's interesting,” he replied.  “I'm not really religious, though.  I used to go to church…  But me and God, we have an understanding,” he said with a chuckle.  When I asked what he meant, he went on.  “When I was a kid, I was at church almost every night of the week.  But I didn't like it.  It just never really made sense to me.  So now I don’t really go anymore.”

“Yeah… It would make sense that it would be hard to enjoy church when… you didn't really… care about it.”

Conversation over.

I left work that night feeling like such a missionary failure. What happened? This guy set me up for the perfect opportunity to share Jesus with him, but I was too scared to ask more questions, to breach uncomfortable boundaries.  I had talked about Him with strangers before.  It's not like this was my first ballgame.  But for some reason, the right words just seemed to escape me.

It was that same defeated feeling times a thousand that had me in tears as I revealed my fears to my teammates a week later in Kansas City.  As we sat in our stuffed sofa and chairs, encircling a coffee table piled high with perhaps not-so-realistic expectations, I confessed.  I feel like I am going to fail in Thailand.  I have no idea what to do, and I'm afraid I won't be able to create any relationships with the people.

If I can't do it here, what makes me think I'm going to be able to do it there?





I'm sure Moses and I would've had a few good laughs, a couple of blubbering idiots trying to tell God we can't do anything right.

And then I picture God sitting back with sort of an amused smile, thinking, "Okay… so what?

Apart from me you can do nothing.”

Turns out, nearly every teammate in that circle had experienced some kind of spiritual attack that weekend.  Plaguing thoughts and fears about how there were a thousand people more qualified than them to go.  About how the team would be better off if they weren’t there.  About how they were just fooling everyone with a mere appearance of spirituality.  About how, really, they were just hypocrites.

It should be no surprise.  The greater God’s plan, the greater Satan’s attack.  The more affirmed the calling, the more prevalent the lies seeking to destroy it.

What I tend to forget is that the victory doesn’t depend on my sufficiency, but on the One who is already the Victor.

He is security.
He is relationship.
He is sufficiency.