There are reasons for that, of course. We've been busy with life stuff. Meeting with friends, holiday stuff (we did Thanksgiving here!) and sickness has taken it's toll on our schedules with work and homeschooling. So yeah, this feels good, to sit down and write something. It feels good to put some thoughts to keyboard and process some of what has been going on, and if you haven't noticed, processing what we are going through is really kind of the point of this blog, along with stateside contact, of course.
In October, Rudy, our translator, took some well deserved time off to go spend time with his family in another city and all of a sudden, out of the clear blue sky, culture shock hit. Hard. We were suddenly struck with some of the little difficulties of living in the Philippines. We had more or less a month to sit in our house, not go anywhere or do anything really noteworthy. During this time a sort of weird grumpiness set in. We bemoaned silly things, like the lack of lunch meat, or the fact that I would wound or seriously maim someone to get my hands on some spinach, or some of the cultural situations that we would find ourselves in that really were not that out of the ordinary. But we were suffering from culture shock. We were missing America. We were missing the comforts and the American-ness of our home culture.
Some of you guys were able to see Hollie's video at SRC about her struggle with comfort and that idol here on the ground. That is a snapshot of what we have been going through for the past two months with the almost daily onslaught of creeping thoughts of "why?"
Why are we here? What in the world are we doing? Do we really need to be here? Is this the work God actually called us to? Nobody (seems to) even really wants us here, so why bother? Why not just go home and hide in a hole of shame and failure?
Why in the world were we going through this?
Aside from the fact that culture shock can happen to anyone, missionary or not, we were feeling like we were under attack and a general feeling of uselessness and a drain on resources of the church that lovingly kicked us out of the country almost a year ago. It was (and in some ways still is) an identity struggle we were going through. We were struggling with our identity and how we were wrapping ourselves up in "the work" instead of Christ. We were caught up in the feel and flow of what was or was not happening with work and that seemed more important that resting in Christ and our identity that is hidden with Him. We should have been resting in the knowledge that we are redeemed in Christ and that through and in Him we have finally found out who we really are and don't have to worry about keeping up with the performance of work or status or some sort of ministry facade. Instead we were worrying about the outer, the facing, the facade of what being a "good" missionary is, what our performance looked like and what we thought we should be doing. We, like so many Western Christians, have/are in the process of getting rid of this romantic view of international missions and what in our mind it should look like. We had this misconception and this wrong-headed view that we needed to be suffering more, being more on the front-line of mission work (you know, where the super dangerous and unreached people are, where there are few to no established churches) and not working here because there are lots of buildings and groups that call themselves "church" and I mean really, do we even need to be here?*
We were also going through a slow process of God dismantling our idol of mission work. Because we were struggling with misconceptions and our identity, we ended up in one way or another, turning being a missionary into an idol. Something we rested in. Something we found our security in. Instead of that beautiful and glorious rest from the race and the grind and the day to day flow of junk that we constantly wade through, the rest that we can only find in Christ, we ran headlong into that flow of junk. We turned our performance and identity as a respectable and upstanding citizens of the kingdom as missionaries into a trap and a snare, something we would check ourselves against and became chained to. We are not missionaries first and foremost. We are not that even secondly or thirdly! We are missionaries at like a fifth tier. There are more important things that that that we have as part of who we are. Yet because of the busyness of language school, acclimatizing to the culture (as best we could) and planning a trip for this past summer, we never really had the chance to check ourselves and see what and where we may be slipping into idolatry. It was only when we had a chance to slow down and be quiet in October into November that we were finally able to hear the convicting voice of the Holy Spirit telling us that we needed to pry the lump of dirt that we had lashed ourselves to out of our hands and drop it. We needed to let go of the pressure and the idea that we had of what all of this past year and the next few years means. Has it been easy going since coming to this conclusion? By no means! But we are continually in the process of being redirected from looking at ourselves and our circumstances (that we chose to come to!) and reorient everything around Christ. We have to. We can't survive here without being wrapped in and around Christ. Heck, we couldn't survive anywhere this side of heaven without being orienting our lives around Christ and the rest that He gives us.
'Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the
surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For
his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count
them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be
found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that
comes from the law, but that which comes through faith
in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on
faith— '
(Philippians 3:8-9)
Christ is what is worth knowing. Christ is worth losing everything and being able to let go of everything that we have. Christ is what makes all things, even good things, seem like rubbish compared to the knowing of Him. Through this knowing we gain Him and His righteousness, this righteousness does not depend on us at all, and so we don't have to perform works of the Law (because we can't measure up) or measure up to the standards of the little L law that we suffer through societal pressures (because we can't measure up to that either). We rest in Christ through faith, we get God's perfect righteousness through faith, and nothing we do...or don't do.
It is precisely because of Christ's work on our behalf that we are able to get His righteousness through faith. And because of that we can let go of the pressures that we have put upon ourselves and we can rest in knowing Him. Everything else can fall into their proper place when we put knowing Christ at the center of it all. This is our justification. This is our salvation. This is the most transformational aspect of Christianity, and it is often one of the most ignored aspects.
We need to recover this. We need to rediscover the freedom and joy that we find when we orient our lives around Christ and the cross and His finished work on our behalf. We have to do this. We have to be able to fix the anchor of our lives on the Rock and no matter how and what happens to us, no matter the storms and troubles that we face, we can rest secure that our anchor holds. This has nothing to do with us, but everything to do with the One we are anchored to.
So remember to pray for us as we are still learning and relearning this important lesson. And remember this lesson yourself the next time you are trying to measure up to your job, or your neighbors, or the idea of yourself in your head, or what you think being a Christian is. Remember Christ and that He is your rest and your righteousness.
*The answer is yes, because God called us and had placed us here, so of course this is where we need to be.
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