Who you callin' a missionary?

missionary

-noun Also, missioner
1. a person sent by a church into an area to carry on evangelism or other activities, as educational or hospital work.
2. a person strongly in favor of a program, set of principles, etc. who attempts to persuade to convert others.
3. a person who is sent on a mission.

Does what comes to your mind when you hear the word 'missionary' match the definition given?

For a long time when I thought of the word missionary, i thought of only people who would go to a foreign country to spread the word about Jesus to those they met there. Brave saints of Christendom who devoted their lives to people groups who had never heard about the transforming love of Christ. People who uproot their lives and dive in to new cultures and learn new languages and strange customs to further the kingdom. People that are NOT ME!

I do not feel, like most of you, that I have been called to spend my life in another country for Christ on a permanent basis. However, spending the last 5 days with people who HAVE been called to that changed my perspective just a bit.

I spent time talking and getting to know the ones who are so faithfully serving here in China, a closed, communist country where you can not worship freely or speak the name of Jesus without running the risk of being asked to leave the country by the government.

They do uproot their lives and have been called to immerse themselves in culture that is very different than ours. The spend years learning to speak, read and write the language. They eat things that we spoiled Americans would discard easily as trash. But they form relationships with the people that God places in their paths and pray that God will open a door for them to talk about their faith in hopes that the ones they have given their lives to will spend eternity with Christ.

I heard someone on our trip saying that they "feel like they don't have the right to sit at the same table as these people." He honored their devotion and (it seemed to me) viewed what they are doing as a "higher calling" than his. Now, he may not have been meaning that at all, but I think that many of us think that way.

We live in our posh society in our comfortable houses with things that we have come to take for granted as normal but other would consider an unobtainable luxury (things like heaters and carpet and whole wheat bread.) Sacrifice in "missionary terms" is not in our frame of reference. And yet, I feel that we somehow have missed what God is asking of us.

I am more convinced than ever that we are not that much different than the missionaries I was so blessed to get to know. We have all been called to immerse ourselves in the culture around us. To build relationships in hopes that we will have the chance to share the love of Christ with those that are lost. The main difference that I see is that we have not heard the call, or if we have - we have chosen to ignore it.

If you are a believer, you have been given the best gift ever - the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. If you believe that - how could you keep it to yourself? We don't have to learn a new language or eat strange food, or leave our families or our posh lifestyles. We just have to get past ourselves and our fear (let's call it what it is) and be the missionaries God has called us to be.

Are you up for the challenge? Go and be a missionary in your world today!