Perspectives

I wrote this for my church's newsletter.

“I’m not sure how I got that one…oh, oww!” I groaned as the camp nurse probed my battered and blistered feet.

“If you can just try to stay off of them a while, that will help,” the nurse advised as she taped one of my big toes, and then grinned sheepishly as she made eye contact, clearly realizing that her advice would be impossible to follow. I already had almost two weeks of kitchen duty under my belt at the remote Alaskan bush camp my grandparents call home and my active duties were hardly likely to decrease now that kids’ camps had started.

I stared sadly at my feet as she cleaned on the deep blister on my other big toe, then smiled ironically as Romans 10:15 came to mind. “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news” certainly wasn’t literally true, at least not from a human perspective! Hours of being constantly on my feet working was what had taken such a brutal toll on my feet. I had labored alongside two ladies in their late 70s to prepare and serve food for the nearly 90 native folks who attended the Memorial Day family camp, and completely worn myself out cleaning the camp in preparation for the kids’ camps. Washing sheets and towels, scrubbing bathrooms, dragging hopelessly broken vacuums over hopelessly dirty carpets, gathering Scrabble pieces scattered to all of the buildings in camp and dusting, always dusting, in a futile attempt to cope with the dust everywhere, always arriving from the dirt from the gravel runway. As I trod the dirty clay between the cabins on my numerous errands, I thought I was getting closer to understanding the true meaning of foot washing. It wasn’t just the blisters that made me embarrassed of my feet.

I was unused to the strict gender roles that determined what tasks I was assigned, so I spent a lot of time pondering my late grandmother’s life as a missionary. How many hours had she spent washing the dishes for her family, unnoticed and unappreciated? How often had she struggled with the loneliness and claustrophobia of such a tiny, isolated place? I did mental exercises, imagining my life as a missionary in similar locations. I scared myself badly. I didn’t want that kind of life! Arguments and counter-arguments about ‘calling’ whirled through my head. I was safe. I wasn’t called to this. Was I?

My thoughts often return to this experience as I prepare to help promote a class starting this January: “Perspectives on the World Christian Movement.” It’s all about missions and God’s heart for the world; something most Christians hope they aren’t called to. We comfort ourselves that missions is an optional extreme sport for the spiritual elite and hope if we ignore missions, God might leave us alone. But while I now believe in the need for a true missionary call for long-term missions work, I still can’t see missions as peripheral to the Christian life. It’s something we are all called to.

That conviction is the reason that I’m helping bring the Perspectives class to Santa Barbara for the first time in more than 10 years. In order to understand God, we need to know more about his priorities. In shorthand, that’s missions. But it’s also so much more. And that’s precisely what I’m excited about learning in the class. Won’t you join me?

www.perspectivessantabarbara.org