A while ago, I sat cross-legged at an old wooden table with a long-time friend I surprised by driving 10 hours south on a whim.
Her nickname, Georgia, was derived from her moving to Georgia in 2014, the same summer I met her. Throughout the six years that have passed since that summer, we have kept in contact through letters, phone calls, and the occasional surprise visit.
This particular visit was spurred by the sudden realization I hadn't seen her in two years. Impulsively, I packed my bags the next morning and spent the next three days in wonderful company seeing her now husband (who she had just gotten engaged to the last time I was in Georgia) and her seven-month-old baby.
Which brings us to the old wooden table. Georgia, like me, isn't a big fan of movies and television. This means we usually spend our time going through a steady rotation of long talks, anything involving the outdoors, and board games.
Oh man, we love board games.
Around 10 p.m. we had already exhausted our list of regulars, so Georgia decided to teach me a new game.
Basically it goes like this: You can lay down three of the same kind of card as a set. You can lay down a sequence of cards as a set if they are all the same suit. You can add to another person's set or take away from another person's set if you leave them with at least three cards.
As you can imagine, there is a lot of stealing, rearranging and swapping.
Just imagine this in your head for a minute: In my hand I am holding a 3, which I need to get rid of. In front of me, I have a set: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Georgia has cards 2, 2, 2 so I take the 2 from my sequence and add it to hers. Georgia's husband has cards 1, 2, 3, so I take his 3 and the 3 from my sequence and add them to my hand which now shows 3, 3, 3, which I now lay down as its own set.
I win right? Not yet.
If you remember, I left Georgia's husband with 1, 2 and by the rules of the game you have to leave a player with at least three cards. So I take his 2 and add it to Georgia's 2 pile and then take his 1 and add it to his 1 pile.
Game Over.
The cards I had before worked perfectly well before I rearranged them. They fit within the perimeters of the game. But I couldn't win if I kept everything exactly as it was. I wouldn't win if I was too comfortable with the ways things already were.
I had to undo what had been done. Upset what I had already put in place. Take something good and make it something better so I could ultimately win.
Of course, that's kind of like life recently.
There you are playing a nice hand of cards with COVID19 (just imagine, okay?) You've laid down a few sets and you know exactly how you're going to win the game.
A 3 there, a 7 there, a 9 there and voila! you win.
Except none of that happens because COVID19 stole one card, switched another around, and laid down a set that offers you nothing. So now, instead of winning the game, you're reeling trying to figure out how to lay something, anything down.
You went from winning to simply surviving.
I know, I know, what a completely unrelatable analogy.
I spent the first few days of this pandemic in unrelenting tears, mourning the loss of my world. I have spent the last few days in unrelenting tears, mourning the pain of my African American brothers and sisters, mourning the world we live in that can be so full of hate and confusion and lostness.
The comfortable complacency we once lived in has been overturned. There's no going back to the way things were, we've been rearranged.
And it's with fresh eyes we see the biggest threat is not disease or violence, but of the intoxicating complacency that we've been drinking for so long. A complacency so widespread it infects how we value our world, our neighbors, yes, even our God.
It's an attitude of shrugging our shoulders in perpetual indifference for so long we look like we have Tourettes.
We don't share the gospel because we really don't care, we don't engage in a broken and hurting world because we don't care, and we don't allow the gospel to transform every aspect of our lives because the sacrifice Christ made on the cross was nice and all, but comfortability sounds much more appealing than suffering, carrying our cross, and radical, self-sacrificing obedience.
Except that radical self-sacrificing obedience, that carrying of our cross, that willingness to suffer for the sake of the gospel is exactly the kind of life Christ calls us to live when we sign up for following Jesus.
"This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence" (1 John 3:16-19).
"So do not be ashamed to testify about our Lord, or ashamed of me his prisoner. But join with me in suffering for the gospel, by the power of God, who has saved us and called us to a holy life--not because of anything we have done, but because of his own purpose and grace" (2 Timothy 1:8-9).
"Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Christ Jesus" (2 Timothy 2: 3).
Our faith thrives during hardship, persecution and suffering. Because believers understand the stakes. They know what it means to sacrifice everything, even their life. And so walking into Christianity, they already know they could lose it all, but still believe it's worth it.
But for the vast majority of us who live in America, we walk into Christianity with little idea of what sacrifice, hardship or persecution looks like. For the first time, I think our eyes are opening to the suffering that so many go through here and all over the world.
We're called to engage in the suffering. We're called to radically love. We're called to count up the costs and strive to live out the truth of the gospel no matter what that means and no matter what we lose.
And I think our African American brothers and sisters in the faith have a deeper understanding of what that suffering looks like than we can even begin to comprehend.
We can learn so much about the gospel, about Christ's heart for the oppressed if we are willing to listen. If we seek out sermons from African American pastors, if we listen to their struggles with compassion and a willingness to learn, and if we have an attitude that as believers we are all one body and when one part of the body hurts, we should all hurt.
Suffering isn't our enemy, indifference is. Callousness is. Complacency is.
I believe that we're at the end of an era. An era where all Christianity meant was a nice little small town church with American flags in every front yard. Where all Christianity was supposed to offer were polite people. That isn't our world anymore, and we have to change our definition of what it looks like to follow Christ in order to reach this new world.
And I would argue with that, we gain a more biblical definition of what it looks like to follow Christ.
These days, I constantly find myself laying down my desire to get to Brazil. I hold the desire with open hands, knowing that my plans are not my own. My life is not my own. And however the Lord desires to use my life is for his glory and I want to be willing.
Even if that means suffering, especially if that means suffering.
Today, I stand at 64% of my one-time financial requirements and 41% of my monthly support raised for Brazil. The Lord has continued to call people to this ministry, speak through me so that I am able to ask with boldness and confidence, and pave the way with careful patience.
I pray that I will continue to strive and work to get to Brazil to share his gospel with the lost and broken and hurting people there until he slams the door shut. Until he makes it perfectly clear he has other ideas for my life.
And even though I hold Brazil with open hands, even though I pray for submission in however the Lord decides to move and guide me, there would be suffering involved in having that dream shattered.
There would be suffering involved in the process of coming to terms with the fact that the last eight months of support raising, of informing family and friends, of dreaming up what the next two years of my life are going to look like on the mission field, were all for me to just end up where I started.
There would be suffering involved in trading the more the more exciting calling of going to another country, serving Christ through language learning, building new relationships, and seeing his divine hand leading my every step for life as I've always known it.
I also recognize that overseas missions isn't a big walk in the park. I understand there are untold sufferings and hardships, depths of loneliness that cannot be communicated, and persecution that I haven't yet experienced.
But to me, that radical faith is far, far better than just staying home. Of being around the same people I have known since I have grown up. Doing, well, less exciting ministry.
But even that is telling of my pride. Of my selfishness. Of my unwillingness to suffer for the sake of the gospel, my unwillingness to be ordinary for the sake of the gospel.
A couple nights ago I sat with friends swapping some of our favorite songs and sharing our testimonies over hot tea and card games.
While I utterly dominated in Exploding Kittens, I shared that something the Lord had been teaching me lately was the call to be ordinary. I shared that I realized what an idol of my heart being extraordinary was, and the desire to be seen as something special.
I confessed that the Lord calls us to be a nobody sometimes, and that ultimately is for God's greatest glory and honor and advance of his gospel.
There is suffering involved in surrendering a dream of being something spectacular to a submission to be an ordinary tool used in the extraordinary hands of a spectacular God.
We lose a sense of ourselves, our dreams, our identify, but we gain the heart of Christ. We gain the hands and feet of Christ. We gain an eternal perspective over the perspective of this fleeting life.
As I confessed my sentiments over my now room temperature tea, my friend silently stood up from the table and returned with a small orange book titled Ordinary: sustainable faith in a radical, restless world by Michael Horton.
"This is my only copy so unfortunately I can't give it to you, but you should read this."
In the first chapter, Horton introduces "radical" Christian Tish Harrison Warren who spent her time before college in Africa and much of her college career involved on the front lines in almost every movement. Interestingly enough, Warren wrote that it was ordinary, day-to-day life that was the most challenging for her.
"'In our wedding ceremony, my pastor warned my husband that every so often, I would bound into the room, anxiety etched on my face, certain we'd settled for mediocrity because we weren't "giving our lives away" living in outer Mongolia. We laughed. All my radical friends laughed. And he was right. We've had that conversation many, many times. But I'm starting to learn that, whether in Mongolia, or Tennessee, the kind of "giving my life away" that counts starts with how I get up on a gray Tuesday morning. It never sells books. It won't be remembered. But it's what makes a life. And who knows? Maybe, at the end of days, a hurried prayer for an enemy, a passing kindness to a neighbor, or budget planning on a boring Thursday will be the revolution stories of God making all things new'" (20-21).
Now don't misunderstand, this isn't a contradictory call for complacency. I didn't spend hours writing the first part of this blog just to throw it away with a flippant quote.
There is a difference between complacency and contentment.
There will be many ordinary days in Brazil. There will be many days that I won't "feel" like a missionary. I'm going to feel a 20-something buying weekly groceries, or getting gas, or using broken Portuguese to keep wild kids in line during church.
There will be mundane days where I feel ordinary. Un-special.
The call, the exhortation, is to rejoice in the work Christ is doing in the midst of the boring, the ordinary, the mundane.
No, we don't strive for the comfortable Christianity that sucks the life out of us, only giving us our own selfishness rather than the heart of Christ.
No, what I'm arguing now is what I have been this whole time. That the call to serve Christ is a call to die to ourselves. To suffer for the sake of the gospel. To pick up our cross and follow Christ no matter how unnoticed, unappreciated, unspectacular we are and our lives may seem.
And so I ask you to join me in prayer. Pray for the heart of complacency that is so prevalent in so many Christians and churches. Pray for my own heart as I continually try to fight against a comfortable idea of what it means to follow Christ.
And pray that you and I would be willing to serve Christ no matter what that looks like: whether that is in Brazil or Crawfordsville, Indiana. Whether that's as a common nobody or as one of the most well respected missionaries in the world.
Whatever that surrender looks like, whatever that suffering for the cause of Christ looks like, I pray that we would count up the costs and declare that he's worth it.
