There Is Nothing More Worth Living For: Reflecting on My Missionary Calling
I grew up in a pastor’s home. As a kid, though I heard the Gospel often, the most important things to me were sports and peer acceptance. Unexpectedly, when I got to high school, suddenly, I fell in with the “in” group at school. My dad was quite worried that I might go the way of the world. Strategically, he arranged for me to get a job at a Christian camp as the head dishwasher.
I was surprised at the camp by the genuineness of the faith of the young people my own age. I could see that to them, God was real. All of a sudden (actually gradually over an entire summer), the question formed in my mind, “Wait a minute. What if God is really real?” Further, “And if He is real, why am I living my life this way, pursuing things that won’t last past the 70 or 80 years I am on this planet?”
I began to see everything from the light of eternity.
It began to make sense why people would give their whole lives for the sake of the Gospel; why they would be willing to die for God, be burned at the stake, or to live for Him giving up everything. If God IS real, He is the only thing worth living for. My whole life changed that summer.
A year later, I was walking by a lake at that Christian camp under a starlit night. There was a gentle, cool breeze. I was thinking about the verse “Jesus said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And Lo, I am with you always, even to the ends of the age.’” I was just thinking about that verse. But then I felt like God spoke in my heart, “Those words are for you.” I was so excited. I felt like I knew what I was supposed to do with my life! I couldn’t wait to get home at the end of that camp week and tell my dad what I was feeling.
When I got home, my dad sat and listened to me as I poured out my heart. Five minutes went by, then ten minutes. Finally, he interrupted me. “You want to be a missionary. That is great! BUT, first, I want you to finish high school.”
“Oh no!” I thought. There goes two years of my life… wasted. There were so many people dying and going to hell. I just felt like I needed to get out there right away. I was so afraid that on the day I received my graduation diploma, the Lord would come back, and all that education would be for nothing.
But I did feel like God would work through my authorities — and I began a long, arduous period of training for mission service, eventually becoming a medical doctor, a profession that served well in my 25 years in East Asia. When we (my wife and I with our three kids) arrived on the mission field, at times we were overwhelmed with the need, the confusion, the pain, the death of our daughter and the repeated loss of every identity we tried to build our lives around other than our identity in Christ. It took years to study and understand the language and culture of the people we lived among. But God began to bear fruit, among the doctors we trained, and eventually through them to communities in villages, in orphanages, in nursing homes and now around the world in various places in Asia.
But the greatest joy in my heart is not the fruit that Father has borne. When I went to East Asia, the thought that was in my mind was, “After all God has done for me, the least I could do is to throw my whole life into His plans, His Kingdom work.” I saw it as kind of a “pay-back.”
I didn’t realize that God was calling me to East Asia to bless me! To give me the chance of a lifetime, to know Him in ways I never could have known Him if I had stayed in my comfort zone, stayed in my familiar circumstances. Living my life in a place of desperate dependence on the Father has given me the opportunity, in the words of the Apostle Paul in Philippians 3:10-11, “To know Christ, and the power of His resurrection, the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, and so somehow, to attain to the resurrection of the dead.”
There is nothing more worth living for.
To learn more about serving as a missionary or to take a quiz to help you discern if that’s where God is leading you, visit gponline.org/go/.