People Sometimes Expect Quick Results in Missions. What Does It Really Look Like Most of the Time?

People sometimes expect quick results in missions. What does it really look like most of the time?

Let me give a book that would encourage the church and even encourage missionaries on the field of what it really looks like. Amy Carmichael was a missionary in India. She was there for over 50 years without taking a furlough. She actually began as a missionary in Japan, and she failed. And that's encouraging to me because a great missionary like Amy Carmichael actually started in another place and failed. And she even said, "You can write this down on my gravestone: I could never ever learn Japanese."

So she transitions to India. And she had a fruitful ministry in India. And somewhere along the way, people asked her to write a book about things as they really are on the mission field— the unvarnished version of missions, without the romanticism, without the inflated numbers, without the speed. And she named the book Things as They Are.

And it's essentially an account of the mundane on the mission field. It's an account of plodding on the mission field. It's an account of sorrow and difficulty on the mission field. She'll tell stories about how she'll come to a group of people sitting down in India, and she has sought to learn the language, and she's trying to wear the dress, and she's trying to fit in. And I remember one particular example, the person sitting in the dust points out the one error that she could find in Amy. And that is, she said something like, "Where did you get that hat?"

And as I read that, I thought, I can relate with that again and again, line after line— the mundane, the difficulty, the lack of speed. I'm going to meet with this particular person, and our first Bible study is simply going to be passing off names, and the second time I'm just going to communicate love, and maybe the third time we might actually be able to look at a Scripture passage. The slow.

And I remember Amy said in that book, she said, "Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I have to hold on to a single verse just to get through the day." It is required in stewards that they be found faithful.

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