Little kids often dream about what they will be when they grow up.
Doctors, soccer players, soldiers, princesses - the possibilities seem endless.
My friend, Naomi, always wanted to be a missionary. She couldn’t wait to travel
to far away places and learn to share the gospel in a language different from
her own.
In a few weeks, Naomi will be getting on a plane headed for Brazil to
help friends who are working in the mission field there. But this trip won’t be
the beginning of Naomi’s missionary adventures. Before she steps onto
the plane, before she had even scheduled her trip to Brazil, Naomi started
learning how to be a missionary.
Her training began right here in North America, not in a missionary
training school or at seminary but out on the streets of a little town near her
home. With a few tracts tucked into her pocket, the gospel message fresh in her
mind, and the Holy Spirit urging her on Naomi began to look for people to share
the good news with.
“I used to think that I would share the gospel once I became a
missionary,” Naomi told me over the phone one evening, “but God’s been showing
me that if I’m not sharing it here, I’ll never share it somewhere else. I’ve
realized that if I’m going to be a missionary I’ve got to start now. Here.”
Christians Share the Gospel
The lesson that Naomi learned, and is continuing to learn, is one that
applies not just to those who feel called to go onto the mission field but to
all who call ourselves Christians.
Jesus said “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching
them to observe all that I have commanded you.” (Matt xxviii. 19-20, esv)
Jesus didn’t first ask His disciples which of them would like to be
missionaries, rather He told them that they all were. So the terms ‘missionary’
and ‘Christian’ should actually be synonymous. Some Christians are called to
other countries to share the gospel. Others are called to share it in the
hospital where they work, on a soccer team, or while walking through town. But
wherever we are, we are Christians and Christians share the gospel.
Unlikely Mission Fields
In a little town in the USA, Naomi’s been spreading the good news. God
has opened doors for her to hand out tracts and to speak to people in their
homes, at the grocery store, on the street corner, at a seniors care facility,
and recently in a chicken processing plant.
When Naomi was offered a temporary, part-time position at the plant she
accepted, eager to raise money for her trip to Brazil. It didn’t take long for
her to see how desperately her coworkers needed the Lord and she suddenly
realized that she’d been given her mission field! Right there. In the chicken
processing plant.
Naomi’s temporary mission field reminded me so much of the story of
another missionary who found himself in a similar circumstance. He too found
that God was able to use him right where he was.
Brother Andrew and the Chocolate Factory
“My job was to count the boxes at the end of one of the packing
assemblies, then to wheel them to the shipping room. A slack-faced boy led me
through a maze of corridors and stairways and at last pushed open the door to
an enormous assembly room where perhaps two hundred girls were ranged around a
dozen conveyor belts. He left me at one of them.
“Girls, this is Andrew. Have fun!”
To my astonishment, a chorus of whistles greeted this introduction.
Then, shouted suggestions.
“Hey, Ruthie, how would you like him?”
“Can’t tell by looking.”
Then followed perversion and bathroom talk. Even my years in the army
had not prepared me for the language I heard that morning.
The leader of the foul wisecracking, I discovered, was a girl named
Greetje. Her favourite subject was sodomy: she speculated aloud on which animal
would find its soul mate in me. I was grateful when my cart was full and I
could escape for a few moments to what seemed like the sanctuary of male
company in the shipping room.
Too soon, it was unloaded and I had to run the gamut of whistles in the
big room again.
“This may be a mission field, Lord,” I thought as I took the receipt for
the boxes to the timekeeper’s window in the centre of the room. “But it’s not
mine. I’ll never learn to talk to these girls. They’d take anything I said and
twist it around until -”
I stopped. For smiling at me through the glass partition of the
timekeeper’s booth were the warmest eyes I had ever seen. They were brown. No,
they were green. And she was very young. Blond, slender, she couldn’t have been
out of her teens, and she was handling the most responsible job on the floor:
the work orders and finished-work receipts. As I handed mine through the
window, her smile broke into a laugh.
“Don’t mind them,” she said gently. “This is the treatment they give
every newcomer. In a day or two it’ll be someone else.”
My heart was flooded with gratitude.
She handed me a new shipping order from a pile in front of her, but
still I stood there, staring at her. In a room where the rest of the women wore
enough powder and rouge to make up a circus, here was a girl without a trace of
makeup. Only her own fresh, young colouring set off those eyes that were never
the same shade twice.
The more I looked at her, the more I was sure I had seen her before. But
the question would sound cliche. Reluctantly, I went back to the assembly
line.
The hours seem to drag. By the end of the long day on my feet, every
step on my ankle was agony. Try as I would, I began to limp. Greetje spotted it
at once.
“What’s the matter, Andy?” she shrieked. “You fall out of bed?”
“East Indies,” I said, hoping to shut her up.
Greetje’s yell of triumph could be heard all over the room. “We got a
war hero, girls! Is it true what they say about Sukarno, Andy? Does he like
them very young?”
It was the worst mistake I could have made. For days, long after I would
have lost the value of novelty for them - the girls questioned me about what
they imagined to be the exotic life of the East.
More than once I would have quit the job in sheer boredom at their
one-track conversations - except for the smiling face behind the glass
partition. I took to going there even when I had no receipt to deliver.
Sometimes along with a receipt I’d slip a note of my own: “You’re looking very
nice today,” or “Half an hour ago you frowned. What was the matter?” I kept wondering
how she felt about the talk she overheard, and what she was doing in a place
like this anyhow. And always, I was haunted by the feeling that I knew her.
I worked at the factory for a month before I got up the courage to tell
her, “I’m worried about you. You’re too young and too pretty to be working with
this crowd.”
The girl threw back her head and laughed. “Why Grampa!” she said “What
old fashioned ideas you have! Actually” - she leaned close to the little window
- “they’re not a bad crowd. Most of them just need friends, and they don’t know
any other way to get them.”
She looked at me as though wondering whether to confide in me. “You
see,” she said softly, “I’m a Christian. That’s why I came to work here.”
I gaped in astonishment at my fellow missionary. And all at once I
remembered where I had seen this face before. The veteran’s hospital! This was
the girl who had invited us to the tent meeting! And that was the place where…
I stumbled over my words in my eagerness to tell her all that had
happened, and how I had come here to Ringers on the same mission as her own.
Her name, she told me, was Corrie van Dam. And from that day on Corrie and I
were a team.
My job of collecting the finished boxes took me up and down the rows of
packagers, where I could keep a lookout for anyone with problems. I would pass
word to Corrie, who could speak to the girl in private when she came to the
window for her next work order.” -Brother Andrew, God’s Smuggler (p
46 - 48)
Share the Gospel Right Where You Are
Corrie and Andrew took every opportunity to serve their fellow workers.
They gained the girls friendship and trust and soon had the opportunity to
invite some of them to “youth weekends” that were being put on by a British
evangelist.
Surprisingly enough, the first person among their colleges to be saved
was Greetje! In Andrew’s own words, “Greetje was a changed person. Or rather
the same person with a tremendous addition.”
Their mission field was a chocolate factory. It was the place where they
worked, yet neither Andrew nor Corrie went there for a pay cheque. Their primary
goal was to bring God’s love and the changing power of the gospel to needy
souls.
I hope that Andrew, Corrie, and Naomi’s stories have challenged you and
I pray that they will encourage you to look for the opportunities that God has
placed right in your very own mission field!
In Christ
Quiana