Tag: What Missionaries Aren’t Telling You

In the summer of 2003, Gil and I returned from our first term in Tanzania.  We had been broken in just about every way imaginable.  I had been mentally ill for at least a year of our two-year term.  We had been criticized and left on our own in ministry.  We had no idea what we were doing in our very young marriage and hurt each other deeply.  And the guy we invested in most had stolen from us.

But we had more disillusionment waiting for us back home in California.  Though we had been sent out with much fanfare, our return was a lot less enthusiastic.  Not one group in our home church asked us to share about our time in Tanzania.  So we put together two evenings in our home for people to come hear about it.  We sent out about 50 personalized invitations to all our supporters and friends. We cleaned our little apartment and I spent the afternoon cooking Tanzanian food.  The first evening, four people came.  The second one, no one came.

It was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.  Gil and I both slipped into depression.

Yet despite all of that, two years later, we went back to Tanzania.  And now it’s been almost 13 years.  So what does that make us?  Saints?  Martyrs?  Angels? or….Stupid?

No.

We did it for the joy.

Earlier this week, many of you read the post I wrote for A Life Overseas, called Dear Supporter, There’s So Much More I Wish I Could Tell You.  I wrote that post in a very general way, so that other missionaries could use it and share it.  And though everything I mentioned was true of me, it was true over a 12-year span.  It’s not necessarily true now.  I am glad you read it, but I kept thinking that I wanted to say more to you–the people who know me personally, either in person or through my writing.

Yes, I have often felt like a failure.  Yes, I have just as many personal sins as any Christian anywhere.  Yes, I have often struggled with what to tell you because I fear your judgment.  Yes, I have often felt disconnected with those who sent us out.

But I am not faking the joy.

We returned to Tanzania because there was a significant need we were gifted to fill.  And there is joy in significance and there is satisfaction in filling a need. There is always joy–in a deep conversation with a student, in that light that goes on when someone understands an important concept, in a changed life.  There is joy in learning.  There is even a way to find joy in feeling ignored or going without or being afraid because of how hard things points us to Jesus.

True, we had a lot to learn.  Sometimes I see those 20-something young people, with passion in their eyes and fire in their bellies, ready to go change the world for Jesus.  And I want to pat them gently on the head and say, Be teachable, Younglings.  You have no idea what is about to hit you.

Gil and I pushed through the difficult years of early marriage–through 6, 7, 8 years (it takes a long time, doesn’t it?) before heading out into relatively peaceful waters.  We pushed through thousands of cultural mistakes into a place where we could have a voice here. We persevered through years of struggle of living in a developing country.  When I look back on the early years of this blog, I am amused by how many posts were about electricity and driving and shopping.  How much it consumed me then, and how little I worry about it now in comparison.  Part of that is because Tanzania has changed for the better.  Part of it is because I just got used to it.  And part of it is because we adapted our lives, like when we purchased two forms of back-up power.

And we adapted our expectations for our support back home.  We don’t sit around and wait for people to come to us anymore.  We realize that people are busy and distracted (just like we are!) and it’s unrealistic (and arrogant) to expect a red-carpet.  So instead, we take the initiative to come to you–to your groups and meetings–and we find that once we are there, people are very interested and supportive and encouraging.

We’ve learned and grown a lot, but we’ve also changed our expectations, and that’s half the battle.

So yeah, there’s the failure, and the loss, and the rejection.  But what I also want to tell you is that the joy keeps increasing, and increasing exponentially.  When students come back and tell us about the impact they are having on others.  When pastors come back and tell us that their church went from 10 to 105 in one year.  When we can get through new struggles because we have the experience of the old ones.  We have incredibly deep friendships here.  We have fun.  We like life, most of the time.  The longer we stay, the more the joy increases.  It just took a while to really get going.

I do want to be real with you; I do want you to understand what myself and other missionaries feel and experience.  But I don’t want you to either put me on a pedestal or feel sorry for me.  Many years ago, I believed John Piper when he said Missions is gain!  Missions is hundredfold gain!  And I believed Jesus when he said that if I gave up houses and family that I would get a hundredfold in return.  That in losing my life I would find it.

I don’t know if every missionary you know is there yet.  I don’t know if I could have said it myself ten years ago.  But the longer I live, the more God’s promises prove to be true.

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Part 3  

About a month ago, I was staring at the computer screen for 15 minutes.

Finally I looked up at Gil, frustrated.  “I got nothing,” I told him.

Our monthly prayer update was way over-due.  But I had been putting it off because I had no great stories, no answers to prayer, nothing that seemed worth sharing.

Finally I asked Gil, “Should I just write about our discouragement?”

He paused for a moment.  “Yes.”

Could I have drummed up a great little vignette about one of our students?  Probably.  Those kind of stories are always there.  It would have been true, but it would have felt fake.  The reality is that the overwhelming picture of our ministry right now is discouragement.  Things are not going as well as we had hoped.  Our plan isn’t working very well.  On top of that, there’s been a lot of sickness and injuries or just plain distractions that have been pulling our team down.

There’s probably a dozen reasons why it’s not going well.  And we’ve got a dozen ideas to change it.  We are not giving up; we’ve still got a lot of grit and oceans of grace.

But it was scary to send that email.  In the past months, I have felt the weight of our donors’ disappointment bearing me down, whispering words of criticism and failure.

Surprisingly, so far it’s only been my imagination.  The email I wrote broke all our records for the number of readers, and we probably received more responses from that one message than ever before.  Responses of love, prayers, Scripture, and encouragement poured into our inbox.   Not one word of criticism.

It makes me wish I had done it before.  This isn’t the first time we’ve felt ground into the dust, even after those first two difficult years.  Maybe I didn’t need to feel so scared after all.

However, I know that the anxiety is still there, and won’t ever leave completely.  It is a constant battle to release it to God’s control.  After all, one discouraging email is one thing….what if there are six?  Or ten?  Will people still support us?  How long will they put up with so little fruit?

And again, there is a need for delicate balance.  Even with the public lives that we lead, missionaries still are entitled to some privacy–just like anyone else.  It’s one thing to be vulnerable about ministry, but are missionaries required to share with the world that they are falling apart?  If I was to go back 14 years to do it over again, would I have shared with our entire email list that I needed counseling?  Probably not.  But I would have shared it with some.  I would have looked for those people who I knew I could trust, and poured out my heart to them.  I think it would have made a big difference.

So here’s my advice for the missionaries:

1.  Sometimes we bemoan the fact that people treat us like superstars.  We want to be seen as ordinary; we don’t want people to be intimidated by us.  But what if some of that is our fault?  What if we’ve ensured that people only see the successful, happy, brave side of us and never let them peek at  the blubbering mess on the floor?  Is it fear that keeps us from being vulnerable?  Or pride?  Our supporters don’t need to see everything, but they do need to see more than just the good stuff.

2.  Find the people who have your back.  Look hard for those safe people that you can be real with.  Trying to do this hard life on your own is just not going to work.

3.  Whose ministry is this anyway?  Are we walking in faith?  Are we actively seeking God?  Are we sure of our calling?  Then who do we have to fear?  Who are we seeking to please?  Does God’s work, His timing, His will need defending?  This is what I preach to myself every day.  This is not my ministry.  And if He needs less of me in order to make more of Him, then so be it.  

To be alive is to be broken.  And to be broken is to stand in need of grace.  Honesty keeps us in touch with our neediness and the truth that we are saved sinners.  There is a beautiful transparency to honest disciples who never wear a false face and do not pretend to be anything but who they are. (Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel)

August 2001

I remember the day Gil took this picture during our first month in Tanzania.  Completely fake smile.  I was dying inside.  

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Fourteen years ago, what if I had been completely transparent?

Instead of, Pray for Amy because she’s struggling emotionally, what if I written this in our email updates?

Amy is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

We’re traveling to Kenya during our Christmas break so that Amy can talk to a counselor.

The counselor wants Amy to take anti-anxiety medication.

Instead of, Our ministry is struggling, what if we had written,

The church we are working with is on the verge of splitting.

We were sharply criticized today.  

We feel like failures.  

But we could not.  We were paralyzed by fear.

Missions is brewed in a pot of extremely high expectations.  Missionaries undergo a brutal screening process by their organization.  Church missions committees pepper them with interview questions on strategy and effectiveness.  If you want to be chosen, that’s what you’ve got to prove.

Then, once missionaries are approved, signed, sealed, commissioned, and their picture spread all over foyer walls and refrigerators across the country, they are thrust out into the world to show off their strategy and effectiveness.  After all, they’ve got scores of donors behind them who want to see the return on their investment.

I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s what it feels like.

So when the strategy doesn’t work (since it usually doesn’t the first time around), and there is very little effectiveness to be seen, what then?  What do they tell people?  When a missionary spends three months planning an event, and only three people show up, should he be upfront about it?  When the church doesn’t get planted, or when the planted church falls apart, or when the exciting new believer has been stealing from you….what then?

We wanted to be in Tanzania.  We were not going to give up that easily.  We had a good deal of grit, and a lot of God’s grace, and we were in this for a long haul.  But we were terrified to be honest about how hard it was.  We were terrified of letting people down, especially our donors.  

Surely that wouldn’t happen, you might think.  People love you!  They will support you!  They don’t care how effective you are.  

Except, we knew that is not always true.  We have a missionary friend who confided in a church leader’s wife about her struggles.  She assumed it was a personal conversation, but soon this heart-to-heart talk was spread across church leadership, and before they could blink, the missionaries were pulled off the field.  Unfortunately, the same scenario then happened to another friend.

We heard the stories of friends who lost support overnight because a church disagreed with an inconsequential decision.  We hear the rumblings of, Aren’t national missionaries cheaper?  More effective?  More strategic?  And we interpret it as One false move and you are disposable.

I realize that there is a delicate balance here, because I would agree that there are times when missionaries need to be exhorted, or confronted, or even encouraged to come home.  Supporting churches do need to keep missionaries accountable.  But missionaries need to have permission to struggle, to be confused, and even to fail.

So here’s my advice for the Senders:

1.  I encourage churches and supporters to look at missionary partnerships like a marriage.  When you are choosing to support missionaries, just like when you are choosing who you will marry, you should be really careful.  You scrutinize.  You ask a lot of questions.  You make sure there aren’t any hidden red flags.  But once you take the marriage vows, or once you sign on as a supporter, you’re all in.  For better or worse.  Just as I know my husband won’t leave me on a bad day, I hope that our supporters won’t either.

2.  If you do need to cut a missionaries’ support–for any reason–please, please communicate with them!  We totally understand when people come upon hard financial times.  But when we are suddenly dropped by a donor, with no explanation, our minds instantly go to the worst.  Did I offend them?  Am I not effective enough?  Am I a loser?  

3.  If you are on the receiving end of those missionary prayer letters, I encourage you to pray between the lines.  When you see struggle, you should most likely interpret it as STRUGGLE.  Knock your missionaries off those pedestals and remember that they are flawed and sinful and sometimes just wrong.

4.  If a missionary confides in you, either in person or in writing, know that there is a great deal of trust behind their words.  Treasure that and protect it, just like you would with any other friend.  Ensure your friend that you are a safe place with no expectations and no hidden agendas.  They need this reassurance.

If it seems like I’m being too hard on the Senders, I’ve got things to say to the missionaries as well.   Here’s Part 3.

Just babies….our very first prayer card in 2001

Our first two years in Tanzania were the hardest of my life.

Gil and I were 24 years old.  We had been married only 9 months.  Ten days after we arrived, I had an adverse reaction to my malaria medication that instigated over 6 months of panic attacks.  I was deep in mental darkness, and even when I began to improve, I still was barely coping a lot of the time.

My teaching job required me to wake up at 5:00 and leave the house at 6.  Usually, I didn’t get home until 5 pm.   Gil’s job took place in the afternoons and evenings.  When I got home from work each day, I immediately joined him in his ministry.  I loved what we were doing, but I was utterly exhausted.

Gil had joined a ministry that wasn’t healthy, though we were too young and naive to see it.  We received a lot of criticism and internalized it all, believing the problems really were our fault.  Gil repeatedly asked for mentoring but didn’t get it.

Then came the final blow.  There was a young man who claimed Christ, and we heavily invested in him.  He was at our house 5 days a week for almost a year.  Six weeks before we left Tanzania, we found out that he had been stealing from us.  We returned to the States in pieces.  Thankfully, God’s grace put us back together again, but it was a long road.

No one knew.

We could hardly even talk about it with each other.  For goodness sake, we were newlyweds.  In our eyes, everyone we worked with was experienced and godly and strong and competent.  We certainly couldn’t tell them we were falling apart.

You can bet your life we didn’t tell our supporters.  Oh sure, there were vague prayer requests like, “Pray for Amy because she’s struggling emotionally.”  Whatever that means.  I look back on our prayer updates and they were full of only the good stuff.  Stories about great conversations with young people, about victories and opportunities and answered prayer.

We were not lying.  The good stuff really did happen.  We wanted to stay.  In fact, we came back.  It just wasn’t the whole truth.  Everything bad, which really was overwhelming at times, got relegated to nebulous statements about “struggle.”

I’m writing today because I believe wholeheartedly that we were not alone.  Not alone in how hard it was, and not alone in feeling unable to share it with others.  My next two posts will be about what I’ve learned–one post aimed at the senders, and one post aimed at the missionaries.  Read along and tell me what you think.

Part 2

Part 3