Missionary Suffering Increased Our Love for Jesus

A common fear among those considering missionary service is that serving overseas will have a negative impact on the wellbeing of the missionary family. Will the unique stresses of cross-cultural life threaten the marriage? Will growing up in a foreign culture impede the development of the children? Will their family be physically safe?

These concerns are well founded. In the time our family served abroad, we experienced several acute and unpleasant pressures. Not long after we arrived in one city, the police appeared on our doorstep asking questions about “religious spies.” Though we escaped detection that day, the daily stress of surveillance became like the buzz of mosquitos  we faced every night at bedtime: persistent, invisible, and impossible to eliminate. Nine months later, a sweeping government crackdown required the evacuation of our closest teammates and effectively cut us off from the indigenous church. Six months after this, a life-threatening medical crisis abruptly terminated our foreign missionary service – just as we seemed to be recovering from the previous winter’s persecution. All told, our missionary service lasted less than two years. Why had the Lord called us to “let goods and kindred go,” led us to the other side of the world, and then sent us back so suddenly? The cumulative impact of all these factors upon our family was more than a little traumatic.

Yet an exclusive focus on the costs of missionary life can cause us to miss the blessings. Though our two years overseas were harder than we expected, we returned home changed. Missionary service increased our love for Jesus – not in spite of our sufferings, but through our sufferings. As we entered into the missionary experience, we tasted the experience of Jesus Himself. As we endured hardships for the sake of bringing good news to others, Jesus drew us in to the hardships He endured for the sake of bringing good news to us. As we felt His love for us, we grew in our love for Him. How so?

Leaving family and friends gave us a sense of the largeness of God’s love.

Long before we got on a plane to the far side of the world, our Lord left the presence of His Father in heaven. From perfect heaven to broken earth, from immortal splendor to mortal humility, Jesus traversed the ultimate cross-cultural border in His incarnation. What depth of love fed the furnace of God’s own gospel mission? What mutual affection blazed in that parting of Father and Son for the sake of our salvation? Truly, finite minds will never reach its bottom. Yet on that day when we hugged our parents goodbye at the airport, departing their presence in order to bring God’s promises to lost souls, our own eyes burned with teardrops of the same love.

Language learning drew us into the humility of Christ. 

“Though He was in the form of God,” the apostle wrote to the Philippians, “[He] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:6-7). For our salvation, the Lord Jesus emptied Himself of His glory. He who spoke the stars into existence, He whose word of power upholds the universe to this day (Hebrews 1:3), became an infant who could speak no words. Our Lord set aside His fluency in the languages of heaven and became a student of the languages of men. Since the Gospels tell us that men of Galilee spoke with a noticeable accent (Matthew 26:73), it is even likely that Jesus spoke the language of His mission field with a non-standard accent. How much humiliation did this require? As my family surrendered our own fluency in English and took up learning one of the most difficult foreign languages in the world, we experienced – in a small, creaturely degree – the same humiliation for Jesus that He tasted for us.

Surrendering control drew us into Christ’s own trust in His Father. 

‍Jesus never used His power for self-serving purposes. When He needed food, He refused to take a miraculous shortcut (Matthew 4:1-4). Throughout His earthly ministry, Jesus trusted His Father: “In the days of His flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to Him who was able to save him from death, and He was heard because of His reverence” (Hebrews 5:7). In Gethsemane, when He faced the shameful and painful death of the cross, He refused to call in an angelic airstrike (Matthew 26:53). His last words from the cross perfectly express the trust that characterized His whole life in this world: “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit” (Luke 23:46).

Before moving overseas, my family believed that we trusted our Father in heaven. Yet until we left our home culture, where we spoke the language, where we knew how to navigate all of life’s logistics, and where we had never faced any serious threat to our comfort or safety beyond the routine “first world problems” of suburbia, we did not realize just how much we tended to rely on our own power. I am most happy when I feel most in control. But when we lived overseas, I had to face situations where control was impossible. For our first four months overseas, I taught an illegal Bible study every Saturday morning. As I walked out of my apartment each week, I learned a lot about committing myself, my family, and our destiny into the hands of God. I learned to take Christ’s prayer to His Father and make it my prayer to Him (Psalm 31:5).

Those who raise concerns about the wellbeing of missionary families are not wrong. Serving as a missionary involves suffering. But those who point to such suffering as a reason to avoid missionary service are missing more than they can imagine. The question is not, “Will missionary service hurt?” Rather, the question should be, “Is the pain worth it?” Is leaving my family worth a visceral sense of the depth of God’s love? Is the humiliation of learning a new language worth a deeper experience of how far Jesus stooped for me? Is the loss of control that comes with cross-cultural living worth the growth of faith that comes from taking real risks for the Lord Jesus?

Our missionary service wounded my family in ways we will carry for the rest of our lives. You cannot live cross-culturally, even for a few brief years, without leaving a piece of your soul on a faraway shore. But Jesus only ever wounds us to prune us, to draw us further up and further in to His own bottomless love – that we might bear more fruit in this world (John 15:1-5), and enjoy fullness of joy in the world to come (2 Corinthians 4:16-18).