The Mundanity of Missions

Missionaries make grocery lists, too.

This is part of a series about the effects of Radical Christianity on our expectation of what the faithful Christian life is supposed to look like. Read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 to get up to speed.

Every morning at ten and every afternoon around three we closed our laptops, unfolded ourselves from couches and desk chairs and convened around the open kitchen hearth and a bubbling pot of espresso. It was Italy, after all. And Brad and Estelle were different from any missionaries I had ever met or read about.

They delighted in good food. A tiny cup of espresso, like the bowl of a tulip, its nectar at just the right temperature for sipping, with a single sugar cube stirred in. Silky carbonara, perfected in the company of their Italian friends, dotted with crisp guanciale and twirled into a porcelain bowl ringed with gardenias. 

They were devoted to hard work. They had raised their children in central Africa and partnered with disciples there to translate Scripture into the local language. Now they called Italy home. There they planted churches and collaborated over Zoom with disciples on Bible translations in places where missionaries (even under the cover of business or “tentmaking”) could not venture.

They lived simply, but with great joy. Their past was not without its griefs and frustrations, but these were shared, not as the aureole of some ethereal virtue, but as the earthy silt of shared humanity.

But I did not recognize this beauty in the months I lived with them in the summer of 2013. For me, my internship with them was not a delight, but a disappointment. My plan A had been Sudan. But a resurgence of civil war and my own diagnosis had redirected me to this cushy summer (during which I still struggled with persistent chronic pain and the overwhelming fear that I was somehow failing to live up to my calling).

My journals from that summer are filled with complaints. Complaints about my health, complaints about missing out on a more “exciting” or “impactful” experience, complaints that God had not taken me up on my generous offer to do hard things in His name. My cheeks are flushed with a healing sense of shame as I recall my childish whining, a bee sulking in a field of wildflowers, wondering why I hadn’t been considered important enough to flit among the more brag worthy thistles and thorns.

I considered the mundane too easy, superfluous to the “real work” of advancing the kingdom. If I actually thought about it, I would have acknowledged that a summer in Sudan would also have been filled with hours of sleeping, bathing, laundry done by hand, trips to dusty markets, meal preparation, and hopefully opportunities to enjoy the beauty of a new culture. But it all would have been harder, so I had believed it would carry more weight. There was some arbitrary line in my mind where the relative difficulty and discomfort of a task shifted it from the mundane to the meaningful, from the wasted to worthy.

I had idealized a summer in Sudan for its exotic location and culture and the perceived difficulty of living there relative to the location and culture in which I was raised. I didn’t think it was holy enough to serve in a place where people went on expensive European vacations. But for too long I was utterly incapable of repenting of this self-importance because I could not recognize the hierarchy of place and difficulty that radical Christianity had built into my pursuit of ministry.

Like me, many of my Bible college classmates who intended to serve on the mission field never made it there for one reason or another. Many who intended to do vocational ministry are not. (In fact, my alma mater’s application required an essay detailing our plans for vocational ministry after graduation. I’m sure very few of us are fulfilling what we wrote in those essays.)

But there are several classmates I studied with who are now serving overseas. Their lives, whether in the tamer floral landscapes or in wild thickets of need, look much like my own. Their days are filled with the monotonous, the mundane, and the beautiful earthiness of ordinary life.

One friend and her husband just welcomed their second child while living in a well-developed Eastern European country. Their prayer requests are for grace as they adjust to life with two under two and for perseverance in their language studies in the midst of it all.

Another friend teaches English in West Asia. She often requests prayer for the young people in the youth group she helps to shepherd and for office politics at the English center where she works.

A couple and their three young children have recently moved to a country where they are the first Westerners to have a resident visa approved in almost a decade. They ask for prayer to endure a life largely isolated from the world outside their compound, which is guarded around the clock, and for wisdom and humility as they support and teach local disciples who must practice their faith in complete secrecy.

Paul, in his first letter to the Thessalonians, urges disciples to live quiet lives (4:11). I was making it my aim to do the opposite, as so many missionary biographies modeled for me and youth conferences and mission trip experiences urged me. I was intent on escaping the mundane, or at least relocating to a place where the mundane could be disguised by the exotic.

But 10 years after those disappointing days in Italy, I have come to understand that the most faithful missionaries are simply those whose quiet lives have been planted at a longitude and latitude different from where they were born and raised, whose grocery lists are completed at coordinates no more or less holy than my own.

Beauty on My Bookshelf
My team at work incorporates a book club aspect into our team meetings, and we just finished The Stranger In the Lifeboat by Mitch Albom. It was a beautiful picture of God’s persistent pursuit of us in our doubts, and also the power that we can only find when we surrender to belief.

Beauty in Michigan
The Festival of Faith & Writing was filled with rich conversations, writing opportunities, and so much learning. It was an absolute pleasure to meet some other Substack writers I’ve followed for a while, including

Sarah E. Westfall

,

summer joy gross

,

Shannan Martin

,

Jenai Auman

,

Sarah Southern

,

Liz Charlotte Grant

, and

Lyndsey Medford

.

In pursuit of Beauty,