Mom, Do You Have a Heart for Missions? Here’s Your Test

I knew a missionary named Cassie.

Cassie had prepared for the mission field her whole life. She was passionate about the gospel and had surrendered her life to the Great Commission– the ministry of discipleship.

It wasn’t easy for her. The demands of the mission field were hard on her body (she was kind of a frail person.). Sometimes just the long hours she labored in the heat–she didn’t have the luxury of air conditioning–took its toll on her. Sometimes she got sick but the people there needed her so she had to keep going.

Cassie she never flinched. Though her body was frail, she was strong. Her love for the Lord was unwavering, and it drove her on to minister to the people there, and she did it without complaining.

She and her husband suffered poverty, distress, hostility and sickness, none of which deterred them from their love and commitment to the people God had placed in their lives to minister to. They could see past the temporal hardship because what they were doing had eternal consequence. It WAS hard….but their love for God’s people drove them on.

Cassie is….a mom. The mission field I just described is her home. Those people she has devoted her life to are her children and her neighbors.

Is there something inside you that suddenly feels differently about Cassie than you did at first? Do you know why that is? Because you don’t think that what you do in your home is as important as what someone else is doing out there.

All of us are guilty of having grand, noble thoughts when we think of foreign missions or other organized ministries–and we should. We should. It’s a life of hard work and sacrifice–more than we will ever know, and more than Cassie will ever know– and we should be supporting missionaries who give their lives to the mission field.

But, we don’t give equal weight to the ministry of motherhood; another mission field where people are discipled, where the Great Commission is carried out daily. That’s the heart of the gospel–bringing souls to Him. And even if you understand the blessing and gift of children, you still don’t grasp the full weight of the ministry of this mission field that you’re in, and a failure to do so has grave consequences.

Well I can tell you that the world doesn’t see the importance of what you do either, but that’s not our business. We are in the business of pleasing God, not each other. Amen? And so I want to talk to YOU about your job. It doesn’t matter what other people think.

But it matters colossally, what you think.

Because listen: the pervading sense of non-importance the culture attaches to motherhood affects how you think about it and when we can’t see the importance of our job, we easily become frustrated and unhappy. And nothing affects our effectiveness or lack of, more than how we see our role.

Rachel Jankovic said:

“It is easy to think you have a heart for orphans on the other side of the world, but if you spend your time at home resenting the imposition your children are on you, you do not. You cannot have a heart for the gospel and a fussiness about your life at the same time…You cannot have a heart for missions, but not for the people around you. A true love of the gospel overflows and overpowers. It will be in everything you do, however drab, however simple, however repetitive.”

That convicts me so deeply. Does it you?

So many times we find ourselves feeling guilty for not doing enough and so there’s this pressure to participate in ministries outside of the full time mission we already have at home. And that can leave us stretched too thin to be an effective minister to our families.

Some of you sitting here are struggling with the thoughts that you aren’t doing enough.

And there are seasons for different women. There are times when a woman is freer to participate in things she may not be able to in the throes of motherhood. The ministry of home will naturally flow out to others around it, in due time.

But the church is not telling the mother in that busy season that she already has a mission field, that her job in this season is enough.

So I’m here to tell you that your mission field is enough.

A journalist once asked Mother Teresa, after all her years of missions work and after all of the hurt and brokenness she has seen, what is the one thing people can do to change the world.  Her answer?  “Go home, and love your family.”  

Because the world is changed one home at a time and a Jesus-lovin mama who gratefully embraces her mission field is a powerful catalyst for that change.

So why is the mission field of motherhood so overlooked? Wrong thinking–thinking that’s rooted in the flesh, that crept into the church and into our own thoughts. And it’s important that we understand this and work on dispelling the wrong ways we think about children and motherhood, and be able to give an answer. Because the truth is, since the thinking of the world has so infected the church, when you devote your life to the mission field of home, you aren’t going to be understood, sometimes even by other Christians.

So what are a few of the reasons–the wrong thinking that causes us to fail to see motherhood as a mission field?

1. We’ve lost sight of the purpose of children and the way God views them. 

We need to understand God’s view of children, because it changes the way we live, the way we parent–it changes everything.

So if children are just a commodity, the way our culture often treats them, if they are simply an asset to me, or a liability as they are sometimes treated, something to fulfill my life, something I do because having children is the norm, that radically shapes my life choices.

But if I see children the way God sees them–godly seed to be raised up to glorify Him and advance the Kingdom of God, gifts given to me as a heritage of the Lord, over which I am to be a steward and of which I must give an account, that radically shapes my life choices.

2. The second problem with our thinking is that our timetable is so different than God’s. In our “instant gratification” society, where world news is 5 seconds away, we grow impatient. And that impatience flows to the rest of our lives. We want to see results, even in ministry…especially in ministry. We want big numbers and we want them fast. Those are the ministries that look important to us.

Now certainly, throughout history, God has orchestrated times of mass conversion, but typically, from Scripture, that’s not how He’s chosen to do ministry.

In the 3 years Jesus was on earth, he had about 125 true converts at the end of his time.The Son of God, the perfect missionary. See God works over large spans of time and those seeds Jesus planted, they’re still growing, more than 2,000 years later. He didn’t fret about the small numbers or the time it took him to pour into other’s lives, because He worked on God’s time-table. He never measured success by numbers. And he was content to do the next thing, even if he couldn’t see the results, because He knew God would fulfill his purposes.

One of a mother’s greatest needs is long-term vision. We absolutely have to have faith in the harvest that God will bring IN HIS TIME. We will plant seeds that we will never see come to fruition. You’re not going to see some of your great grand children, but we’re living now for them. And that’s OK because it’s not about us and our results.

3. Another big problem is that even though we hear it from the pulpit, we read about and think it’s great, we mostly don’t apply it to real life. And that’s the idea of living in absolute humility–we talk about it, but it’s hard to live out. True humility is to be content with God’s favor, losing our lives to save them, focused on eternity and being OK if we never receive any recognition of man.

There was a lot in that sentence. Do you know the peace we could have if we learned to live the kind of life Jesus lived, with His face set like flint, oblivious to the opinions of others, just being about His Father’s business?

What is the mission field?

It’s where we live out the Great Commission. It’s where discipleship happens. And mom there is no mission field riper than your home. God has hand-picked you to raise the disciples in your home. We can’t treat that lightly.

Now am I saying that there is no room for any ministry outside our family, that our children should never see us reach out beyond our homes? Actually, quite the opposite. The mission field of home encompasses those around us, and it should come quite naturally for our lives to be a living example of readiness and willingness to minister to those God puts in our paths. 

Thinking about my example of Cassie, let’s stop categorizing “important” missions, but failing to see the abundant mission field right here in the everyday, where Jesus urged us to be faithful.