Forward into Mission (Again!)
When I left Haiti a few years ago, I didn’t leave because I thought it was time to start a career, further my education, and settle down and be rooted. In fact, in my last year of living in Haiti, I was more and more convicted that there is a real call in the Catholic Church to foreign mission, and that it is a call, and a burning desire, that the Lord has placed on my heart personally. Leaving Haiti was a step forward. I didn’t exactly see how the Lord would fulfill the desires He was placing in me, but I knew I had to take the next step.
After I moved to Kansas, I remember going to mass and listening to the Gospel. When I heard Jesus say to His disciples, “Follow me,” or “Go, and make disciples of all nations,” there was a burning and aching within me. All of scripture is FULL of the call to mission – I couldn’t stop hearing it, even when I wanted to.
During the past two years I have spent in Nashville, I have loved teaching. I have loved learning and furthering my own education. However, the past couple of years have been really difficult for me personally as I have wrestled with managing my time and energy, trying to invest in community and have meaningful relationships, and trying and often failing to keep a rhythm of daily prayer in my life. All of my weaknesses have felt exposed – from my lack of patience in the classroom to my lack of personal prayer, I have often felt like a walking collection of sins. Thankfully, as a Catholic, I have the blessing to re-encounter the Lord and His mercy, over and over and over through the sacrament of reconciliation. I have been reminded that I need God’s grace deeply, I can do nothing without His help, and that His love for me goes far and beyond my sins and failings. Though I have become reacquainted with my own weaknesses, I have simultaneously become reacquainted with the grace and love and mercy of a Father who never stops loving me, even when I think He should.
To be truly real and vulnerable, I am also really tired of moving. I am tired of not being rooted. I want to have a yellow house with a front porch and a garden and dig my hands deep into the dirt. I want a chicken coop in my backyard and maybe even a milk cow! I want to know my neighbors and watch their kids go through many seasons of life. I want to meet a new friend and know that I might still live in the same city as them a year from now. I desire consistency, stability, the kind of community that runs years deep. I want to have conversations with friends about how ten years ago we used to do this thing down the street at that place that’s closed now but was owned by so-and-so’s uncle.
I have spent hours and days in recent months trying to reconcile these two conflicting desires – my desire for a deep and abiding stability and rootedness, and my desire to bring the love of Jesus to the nations, to learn a language for the sake of the Gospel, to live among the poor – rubbing shoulders with one another’s brokenness.
There is a moment that I think about sometimes. A few years ago, I went to visit a friend’s grandmother in Haiti who was sick and had injured her hip. She was sitting/laying on a mat on the floor when we arrived, either because they didn’t have a bed, or she couldn’t get up into it. I remember getting down onto the floor with her and sitting sort of uncomfortably in my skirt, sweating. We sat and talked with her and her family for a while, we prayed, looked at x-rays that I didn’t understand, and she spoke to us semi-coherently about her life. The reason that I think about this sometimes is because this is what love does. Love gets down onto the floor with the one who is hurting. Love doesn’t stay standing, separated, looking down at the suffering one. Just like Jesus, who couldn’t remain in Heaven and watch us suffer, but came down into the midst of our suffering and suffered with us, love goes deep down into the suffering of the other and stays there with them in the midst of it.
This is what I want to do with my life. And sometimes, I can’t explain it. It’s easy to refute. I am sure there are many people in the world (some who I have already met), who would give me many reasons that I shouldn’t or don’t need to go. There is suffering here in America. I know. I have seen it. And yet, there is something somewhat unexplainable that pulls me forward again into foreign mission.
More than anything, it is about the love of Jesus. The love of Jesus rocked me when I first learned about it from a spiky haired youth minister about fifteen years ago, and it still rocks me to this day. How can I not share that with the world?
“It is impossible for us not to speak about what we have seen and heard.” – Acts 4:20
After I moved to Kansas, I remember going to mass and listening to the Gospel. When I heard Jesus say to His disciples, “Follow me,” or “Go, and make disciples of all nations,” there was a burning and aching within me. All of scripture is FULL of the call to mission – I couldn’t stop hearing it, even when I wanted to.
During the past two years I have spent in Nashville, I have loved teaching. I have loved learning and furthering my own education. However, the past couple of years have been really difficult for me personally as I have wrestled with managing my time and energy, trying to invest in community and have meaningful relationships, and trying and often failing to keep a rhythm of daily prayer in my life. All of my weaknesses have felt exposed – from my lack of patience in the classroom to my lack of personal prayer, I have often felt like a walking collection of sins. Thankfully, as a Catholic, I have the blessing to re-encounter the Lord and His mercy, over and over and over through the sacrament of reconciliation. I have been reminded that I need God’s grace deeply, I can do nothing without His help, and that His love for me goes far and beyond my sins and failings. Though I have become reacquainted with my own weaknesses, I have simultaneously become reacquainted with the grace and love and mercy of a Father who never stops loving me, even when I think He should.
To be truly real and vulnerable, I am also really tired of moving. I am tired of not being rooted. I want to have a yellow house with a front porch and a garden and dig my hands deep into the dirt. I want a chicken coop in my backyard and maybe even a milk cow! I want to know my neighbors and watch their kids go through many seasons of life. I want to meet a new friend and know that I might still live in the same city as them a year from now. I desire consistency, stability, the kind of community that runs years deep. I want to have conversations with friends about how ten years ago we used to do this thing down the street at that place that’s closed now but was owned by so-and-so’s uncle.
I have spent hours and days in recent months trying to reconcile these two conflicting desires – my desire for a deep and abiding stability and rootedness, and my desire to bring the love of Jesus to the nations, to learn a language for the sake of the Gospel, to live among the poor – rubbing shoulders with one another’s brokenness.
There is a moment that I think about sometimes. A few years ago, I went to visit a friend’s grandmother in Haiti who was sick and had injured her hip. She was sitting/laying on a mat on the floor when we arrived, either because they didn’t have a bed, or she couldn’t get up into it. I remember getting down onto the floor with her and sitting sort of uncomfortably in my skirt, sweating. We sat and talked with her and her family for a while, we prayed, looked at x-rays that I didn’t understand, and she spoke to us semi-coherently about her life. The reason that I think about this sometimes is because this is what love does. Love gets down onto the floor with the one who is hurting. Love doesn’t stay standing, separated, looking down at the suffering one. Just like Jesus, who couldn’t remain in Heaven and watch us suffer, but came down into the midst of our suffering and suffered with us, love goes deep down into the suffering of the other and stays there with them in the midst of it.
This is what I want to do with my life. And sometimes, I can’t explain it. It’s easy to refute. I am sure there are many people in the world (some who I have already met), who would give me many reasons that I shouldn’t or don’t need to go. There is suffering here in America. I know. I have seen it. And yet, there is something somewhat unexplainable that pulls me forward again into foreign mission.
More than anything, it is about the love of Jesus. The love of Jesus rocked me when I first learned about it from a spiky haired youth minister about fifteen years ago, and it still rocks me to this day. How can I not share that with the world?
“It is impossible for us not to speak about what we have seen and heard.” – Acts 4:20
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