The Road to Missions #3

When I mentioned that we put missions "on the back burner" in the last post, that's essentially what we did. After we got married the summer of 08, we slowly and subtly got sucked into the American dream.

1. My change in degree

2. House

3. Dog

I changed my major from English with missions to English Education. At the time, I thought it was a wise decision (and was told so by a number of well-meaning Christians) because it was a more safe career path. What can you do with a degree in English and missions? Not much... When you tell people that your major is English and your minor is missions, they ask, "So what are you going to do with that?" When you tell someone that your major is English Education, they say, "Oh, so you're going to be an English teacher!" To be honest, I liked not getting the questions. And I really did like (some of) my education classes.

We were renting a house at the beginning of our marriage. We learned about a neat program where you could build a house for a fairly decent price. We were sucked in. We contacted the company and went to a number of meetings. In fact, we had the blue prints for our house drawn up and a lot chosen. I had planned our life- where we would live, where I would teach, and when we would have children. We were still considering missions at this point, but we figured when we decided to go into missions, we would find someone to rent our house to. (below is the house we rented)

We got a dog (we don't regret this decision, but buying a dog a few years before you plan to go into missions isn't really thinking on God's terms).

Obviously, none of these things are wrong in and of themselves. The problem was that we knew God wanted to use us in missions, but yet we were chasing things that would prohibit us from entering into missions.

As I mentioned in a previous post, our one-year anniversary trip began the change. I was reading Crazy Love by Francis Chan, and suddenly felt convicted about building a house. Chan shares a story about how he and his wife chose to sell their house for a smaller house and how many, well-meaning Christians encouraged him against doing so for various reasons

(they still sold their house and were able to give more money away as a result). As he shared his story, I realized that I felt like I had a right to own a house. And I didn't. I knew, while reading, that by building a house, Ben and I would be making a decision that would make it difficult to go into missions... because of money but also because of comfort. We would become comfortable. I debated about whether I should say something to Ben or let God show him what he had shown me. There were times in the past where I knew it was better to let God work on Ben's heart without me saying anything... but I knew this wasn't one of those times. So I very nervously told Ben about what God had convicted me in. He took it hard... for the first hour. But by the next morning he told me that he agreed (I love that he adjusts well to change), and we e-mailed the contractor to stop any further process on our house (which is somewhat of a story itself, and God totally had his hand in it).

(for our one year anniversary we went to Orlando, FL)

While we knew that not building was the right thing to do, we struggled at first to understand why God had brought us so far in the house-planning process. We had been talking with the company for about 4 months and literally were one step away from breaking ground. We had both prayed about the decision to build often. So why hadn't God made it clear that we shouldn't build until now? We eventually realized the problem. We wanted God to pound us over the head and yell at us in a clear voice, "NO! DON'T BUILD THE HOUSE!" In essence, if we had been honest with ourselves and with God all along, we would have known that we shouldn't have built.

We knew God wanted us to go into missions.

We have the Word of God in front of us, and know that owning a house is not necessary... but we just really fell in love with the idea and became blinded.

We knew that building a house would hinder us from going into missions, at least for a while.

But we just thought we could change our plans. We could build, teach, have a dog, work construction, and THEN go into missions. But the problem is that that's not what God was calling us to do. He didn't want our later years, after we had enjoyed the things we wanted to. He wanted us to be cheerful givers. While this passage (2 Cor. 9) is talking about money, God also wants us to be cheerful and willing givers of our time and lives, and we were being reluctant.

Still more to come....

[I'll share more about the decision I made about my degree of study in the next post]