Witness Protection
I looked around the table at the orientees and asked, “If you could use one word to describe maturity, what word would you use?”
It was a bit of a trick question. I thought I knew how they would answer. They responded with words like wise, discerning, experienced, responsible. When we got to the last person on my left, she said, “Well, I am picturing a person. Someone who has discipled me. And I just think of kindness.”
Bingo. We were getting somewhere.
We were in our last Member Care session of orientation: Self-Care for the Long Haul. With Jonny out of town, the teaching was down to me, and I felt that the Holy Spirit had laid something on my heart that wasn’t in the notes.
“Are you willing to do a little Bible study together before we start in on the teaching? Maturity and self-care may seem like unrelated topics, but bear with me.”
Yes – wisdom, discernment, experience, responsibility, along with the gifts of the Spirit, and great faith are all wonderful and to be desired. But they can also be like a clanging cymbal (1 Cor 13). A mature Christian is one who most resembles Jesus. And Jesus is LOVE.
For those being sent as missionaries out into the world, protecting that witness of love is of the utmost priority.
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 13:34-35If loving one another is the witness of Christ to the world, we must guard that witness with violent tenacity and tender care.
“You may be wondering how this is related to the subject of self-care,” I said. So we turned to the Gospel of Matthew.
"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets." Matthew 22:37-40
As Yourself…
I fail so often at loving my neighbor. I believe that we often fail at loving our neighbor well because we do not know how to love ourselves well. I don’t mean bubble baths and binge-watching, nor do I mean more prayer, more Bible, and more serving. I mean things like entering into the Lord’s rest by engaging in Sabbath, recognizing our limitations in a season due to sickness or circumstances, walking in awareness and self-compassion for our traumas, and choosing to ‘be with’ Jesus as the precursor to ‘doing for’ Jesus. Sometimes it does involve more Bible reading, more engagement in prayer, and more fasting. Sometimes it involves feasting and dancing. It means taking up our cross daily, and it also means heeding the invitation to lay down in green pastures and beside still waters.
When we begin to walk alongside ourselves compassionately, instead of wallowing in self-pity or being a harsh self-judge, we can begin to walk alongside others in such a way.
Part of God’s great invitation to me in recent years has been to learn how to love my neighbor by learning to love myself as God loves me, and to allow myself to receive that love from others. I suppose it does, after all, involve wisdom and discernment, experience and responsibility, and a whole lot of kindness.
Self-care for the long haul isn’t just about having healthy missionaries out in the field. It’s about protecting the witness of the good news of Jesus that is made evident in our love for one another.
Whether we are readying to deploy as cross-cultural missionaries or trying to live in a kingdom way around our own dining table, may we all grow into maturity, “to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ . . . to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.” (Ephesians 4:13b, 15b-16)