Putting It All Together
Five Ways to Sort Through Your Optionsby Steve Hoke
1. Find a friend to help you. People don’t do radical things by themselves. And face it: you’re doing something radical by going into cross-cultural work! Find a trusted friend or leader in your church who will understand your motives and mission hopes.
2. Stretch out your future on a timeline. This is one way to identify potential roadblocks and conflicting agendas. A well-thought-through timeline will show you when you are attempting a “mission impossible” with utterly unrealistic expectations.
3. Stretch your faith. On the other hand, don’t settle for what is merely possible. God may lead you beyond the easy or the obvious. You’ll have to trust Him no matter where you go, but prepare yourself for some risk-taking ventures.
4. Face your fears. You may have good cause to worry. Perhaps you fear being single the rest of your life. You might fail miserably and be embarrassed before everyone who supported you. If you dredge up all the fears and look at them in the light, some will still be scary, but you may also get a laugh out of some silly scenarios in your mind. You might be needlessly afraid of being attacked by guerillas. You might have a phobia about getting shots before you go. You may not feel any more courageous after the exercise, but you won’t be paralyzed with false impressions.
5. Deal with freedoms. In order to be truly free to choose the right mission opportunity, you may have to give up some of the prerogatives you think are yours. Obey God. It is not a matter of finding something that “fits” you or furthers your career. The real issue is being utterly mastered by Christ. You may need to face up to a mistaken sense of entitlement. Do you somehow believe that God is rigging up the whole world to revolve around your own self-fulfillment?
Be prepared to relinquish areas of your future or dreams that you thought were yours to pursue. If you let them go into God’s hand, He has promised to give you more than you bargained for. “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for Me and for the gospel will save it,” Jesus said in Mark 8:35. Jim Elliot put it this way: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
Adapted with author permission from Stepping Out: A Guide to Short-Term Missions. Copyright © 1987 by Short-Term Missions Advocates, Inc. All rights reserved.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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