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Bryan: The missionary endeavor is not a solo venture. Christ has called all His Church to obedience in the Great Commission. Nevertheless, virtually every missionary will struggle with loneliness on the field. As faithful as a sending church may be in prayer, giving, and communication, even if friends and family are supportive, whether they go on a team, married, or single, missionaries will face the solitude and separation of going.
So, does God leave us to our own devices or ask us to grin and bear it when it comes to loneliness on the mission field? Let's listen in as Brooks Buser recalls his own experience and the Scriptures that sustained him as he answers this question from Ask Missionary listener Eve. "How do you struggle with loneliness as a missionary?"
Brooks: Well, this is—I want to say—a black belt question, just because it really gets into the weeds of what I believe every missionary goes through. The missionaries that haven't faced loneliness, well, they just haven't been there long enough yet. Someday you will face that, especially if you're going into frontline missions where you're going to be in a new culture, a new language, and the loneliness walls sometimes feel like they're closing in on you.
When we moved into Yembiyembi, I remember that we had co-workers with us and we built our three houses together. And then they just couldn't move in when we were scheduled to go. And so Nina and I moved in alone. I remember when the airplane dropped us off—we didn't have an airfield yet—and it dropped us off at the airfield that was closest to us, this little grass airstrip. And then we got in a canoe with the Yembiyembi people, and we had a motor canoe on the back. And we took off in the motor canoe and started going downriver to Yembiyembi. It was going to be about two hours in the canoe to get there. And the little Cessna airplane with our missions pilot flew over us. He found us on the water. Then he dropped down like 200 feet over the water and just went screaming over the top. And then he just flew off into the distance. And all we could hear was just the little motor on the back taking us further and further, deeper into the jungle. And to be honest, it was really scary. It was one of those feelings like, what in the world have we done? And we've got our little boy who's sitting there with his hat on and his thumb in his mouth. He's three and a half years old, and we're heading into the teeth of whatever the Lord has for us.
My wife does a class on women in language and living in the village and living in a context where they're getting lonelier. She calls it starting to feel blue. And so, Eve, for you—and I would give the same advice to men—I think the advice that my wife gives in that class is so good, and I'm just going to give a few snippets of it.
Number one, when you're starting to feel like the walls are closing in and you're getting blue: exercise. We find that missionaries who exercise regularly, it has this—and again, my wife's the counseling psych major, I'm not, I'm a business guy, I add numbers and figure out rates of return, but she's the counseling psych person—the way that your mind works, the way that God has engineered our minds, is that when you have a good sweat going, it clears out some of the different things in your mind that are really pulling you down and can really weigh down especially someone who is in a particularly depressed situation. It just helps clear things out and helps you think more clearly. So exercise for sure. Get a good sweat going. Do a good jog. If you're a guy, do a good series of push-ups. Someday the day will come where I can't do 100—I can't do 100 push-ups in a row, I'm just going to be clear on that—but I can do 100 push-ups in a workout, and I usually break them up into sets of 30 or 35 or something to get to 100. Do something to where it's going to stretch you physically.
Number two, get out of your house. One of the things we found, especially for ladies in fourth lane missions, is that their house starts to become a prison cell. And it's really easy to start thinking about back home—what they're doing back home, whose birthday it is, what wedding is coming up, what the church is doing as they're getting ready for their Easter celebration. Those are not helpful thoughts. And the best way to get out of that is to get immersed in the people that God has put you among. Get down to the village. Get out to the towns. Get to the places where they're speaking the language that God has sent you to and get among those people. Be with them. Eat their food. Sit with them. Become immeshed in the world that God has set you in. It was always a joy to Nina and me when we would come back into Yembiyembi over the 13 years that we were there. And the Yembiyembi people would sit with us for like three hours and just catch us up—so and so had their papaya tree cut down, and then a wild pig chased so and so, so and so it sounds like is going to have their daughter marry into this clan. And it was just all this village gossip. And it was really good for us to push away from everything that we had heard in town, everything that we'd heard back in the United States if we were coming back from a time on home assignment, and push into the life of the Yembiyembi, to be there fully in mind and in body. So get out of your house.
And then number three, obviously—and I pray that this is first and last with you—go to your verses that are going to help you as you start to battle loneliness, as you start to feel that you are alone in this. My go-to—I had two verses that I would go to. My first one was Matthew 28:20. This is the end of the Great Commission. If God has sent His ambassadors to the ends of the earth to make disciples and to teach them all that He has commanded, and Jesus is giving this to the first disciples but also by virtue to all who would come behind: "And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." That word "surely" just encouraged me so much in the middle of the jungle. It's not, "I am with you always to the end of the age." Surely—that heightened emphasis. I am with you. I am right beside you. There is nothing that is going to come upon you, nothing that will befall you, that doesn't come directly from My sovereign hand. Brooks, you're sitting in that canoe. You can see your wife and you can see your son, and you're heading down and the sun's going down and you're not going to get there until it's dark. I am with you. I'm right there with you. I'm going to be with you always to the very end. And whenever that end comes, it will be from My hand. But nothing's going to happen until that very point. So that verse—I trust you have Matthew 28:16–20 in your mind.
And then there's this other one at the end of Paul's last epistle, written to his son in the faith, Timothy—2 Timothy 4:16. He says this, and it's kind of sad at first, but then he comes back to the main thrust. "At my first defense, no one came to stand by me, but all deserted me. May it not be charged against them." And he's in his court case. We know from church historians—we don't have an accurate picture of when he was killed or executed after he wrote this last letter–– but it was fairly soon after. And to think of all the people he impacted, and no one stood with him. He was all alone. And then he comes with verse 17: "But the Lord stood by me and strengthened me, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it." That's a wonderful thing. And he's echoing what Matthew 28:20 is saying. The Lord was right beside him. No disciples, no people that he had invested in—maybe they couldn't make it—but he was all alone. Yet the Lord was with him. The Lord was with him, and the Lord was not going to forsake him, and He was going to carry him safely through to the other side.
I draw great strength from that. Our church has been a bulwark. When we were going through dark times, they would write us emails. We would occasionally have phone calls. And then when the Yembiyembi church was born and we got to see how they progressed—those were all sweet things that have been helpful to us in the fight against loneliness. And I believe at just the right time, the Lord finds that particular thing that we need to stand up under that temptation—because really, loneliness is a temptation. It's a temptation to look inward. It's a temptation to feel forgotten. And the Lord will be there. He will be faithful even in those dark times. And so I've been blessed just thinking of those two verses, blessed by the Church, the body of Christ, as it is in San Diego and all the way out to Yembiyembi. And so I pray for people who are going into those particularly fourth lane contexts where it can feel very dark. I pray that your mind will not run wild and that you remember the goodness of God, that He stands with you even to the end of the age.
Bryan: If you have a question you would like to hear answered on Ask Missionary, drop a comment on this episode, get in touch with us on social media, or send us an email through missionary.com, and your question may be featured on this show. And don't forget to subscribe to the show to get notified when our next episode with Pastor Chad Vegas on how to measure success in missions airs next week. Thanks for listening to Ask Missionary.