“The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: ‘Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.’” – Jonah 1:1-2
Shannon Brink is a mother of 4 kids, a nurse, a writer, and a Canadian Christian missionary in Malawi. In an article entitled “The Reluctant Missionary”, she wrote:
“If anything has become clear in this COVID season which never seems to end, it is that we cannot be a people about doing anymore. We came with agendas, we came with plans, we came with a lot of expectations behind and before us, but we are human hearts needing the grace of God not just to do something through us, but IN us. And now we are locked in our houses, homeschooling our kids, limited in resources and freedom of movement and would you believe, the Church and her Christ will still stand? Without our programs and ministries, without our perfect solutions and ideas, and without us at all.
So with every bit of pain I feel, I take comfort in the stripping away of who exactly I thought I would be in this space and think maybe it’s time to change my title and perhaps more so, actually change my heart. If, at the end of the day, we all realize we need Christ just a little bit, then this entire year would be worth it. Maybe if we possibly learned that we are just as inadequate as we ever feared but just as called as we ever dreamed, we might actually start being the Church instead of trying so hard to do Church.
Maybe, we’d stop trying to be missionaries and just be His.”
The Lord desires to be with us and to follow His call. Today in prayer, thank the Lord that His calling is sure.
“Following Christ is not our initiative, merely our response, in obedience.” – Os Guinness
God’s Word: “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.” – Jonah 3:2
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