My missionary call & crisis

It was a cold, wet Friday afternoon, the last day of finals week, December, 1982, in Monmouth, Oregon. The college campus had become a virtual ghost town. My friends had already left for Christmas break. The night before, in the quietness of my room, I had seen the heavens open and heard the Lord call me unmistakably to the mission field. It was actually quite dramatic and real for my 22 year old senses. By 8:00am the next morning I was waiting for the doors of the campus Administration office to open. They concurred that, yes, my credits were enough to allow me to graduate that very day.

I packed up my belongings in my little ’72 Datsun B210 and made the drive home; a college graduate with a newfound mission. With the zeal of a new convert I descended upon my family that Christmas…

“Guess what, Mom? Guess what, sister? Guess what, brother? I just graduated from school this morning. That’s not all. I’m never going to teach music in my whole life. ‘Cuz I’m going to be a missionary…forever!”

Within a month I was in Mexico City, celebrating my 23rd birthday. I spent one and a half years working with OM in Mexico, experiencing the exhileration and transformation that comes from immersing in the culture and bonding with the people. In a word, God’s voice to me that night in my college apartment was confirmed a hundred fold. I knew my life vocation. I knew my life purpose.

For the next several years I began preparing myself for the mission field. After Mexico, I returned to my family and hometown in Eugene, Oregon. Within a week or two I had signed up for a French class (which I figured I would need if I went to teach English in a North African country) and volunteered as a tutor for the only Salvadoran family in town.

I lived for the future. I was always looking ahead, awaiting the day when I would ‘arrive’, when the mission field would be under my feet and not around the next bend.

While still in this stage, I moved to downtown Los Angeles, California with some seminary friends that were also preparing themselves to go overseas and to live and work in slums. I married Birgit, a young German woman with an equally deep sense of call to live radically in poor communities. Two years into that experience, God began showing my wife and I that the ground we were standing on was, in deed, mission ground. I had ‘arrived’. That future day was here. We were not to ‘go’ anywhere else. This was it.

Then the crisis hit. My hidden ideas and illusions of what I thought it would be like began to surface; unannounced and cleverly disguised. I was angry with God. Wasn’t he supposed to come through in a big way, saving people right and left, largely because they were so impressed with my commitment and sacrifice? How could my poor neighbors not rollover and repent over such a great missionary presence in their midst?

There I stood, naked and hurt, without any futuristic dreams to hide behind or console me. God wasn’t healing the sick or saving the lost. Where was He? What on earth was He doing? How could he abandon me at a time like this, especially when I had made such a sacrifice for Him? (Translated more honestly: ‘Where’s the payback on all that I’ve put into this?’)

Meanwhile our small, fledging group of missionaries was adrift in the big, tumultuous sea called: Inner city America. We began as peers that wanted to learn and be a devotional community. We also had ideas of ministry (without long-term commitments). Yet, we didn’t know what all this meant and we didn’t know how to discover what it meant. Besides, which one of us would we allow to lead such a vision-making process? Who could help us?

There was no one. That is, no one close enough. No one with the right experience. No one with the time and commitment to help navegate us. – John Shorack, 1996