It has been a good long while since I have read a good book. Well, it has been a while since I have read any book (I have a young child). But this year has already started with a banging good one. Normally I read through and dog-ear pages I like, go back and type all the amazing quotes up, and then hit delete until I give you a good page or so of thoughts.
Nope. Not this time. I am just going to give you all four pages. Because I can't hit delete on any of it. I don't even know the legalities of posting four pages of quotes. I am going to buy this book (I just read the library copy), and I suggest you do to, especially if you are a missionary, work with refugees or in the inner city, or have ever had those desires to do so. Missions is changing. It needs to change. And that change starts in our hearts and humility.
Assimilate or Go Home by D.L.Mayfield
“My mother raised me and my sisters on a steady diet of missionary biographies. The vast majority of them were about women: how they left all that they knew and any hope of a future to go and preach the good news. They were the original abolitionists, whistle-blowers, labor representatives, feminists. They went to be Jesus to the people that Jesus always went to: those that the powerful wanted nothing to do with. I view it now as a rich legacy of service born out of racist and sexist theology: the mission field was one of the few places a woman could be in a place of leadership. And so the female preachers, teachers, and evangelists left the West, forsaking families and cultures that had no place for their gifts. And they brought liberation with them, wherever they went.”
“I would spend the next several hours (after watching a documentary) turning the facts of inequality over in my mind, aware of how tied up my material comforts were to the suffering of the poor the world over. This happened to me from time to time. The veil of my supremely comfortable world would be ripped away from me, and I would be plunged into the realities of suffering from which I could not let myself escape.”
“If you had asked me in the midst of all those years of learning and unlearning if it was worth it, I would have told you, yes. I would have looked you in the eye and told you the truth as straight as I could see it: it is hard, but I am trying to convert to this way of living all the time (downward mobility); I expect I will be to the end of my days. And please forgive me, but I am trying to convert you along with me.”
“I once heard about a nun in the south side of Chicago who was the principal of a local Catholic school. As the population at this Catholic school was almost entirely made up of black students, one day the nun went from classroom to classroom, and she changed the crucifixes hanging on the walls (to a black Jesus crucifix). “Sister, why are you doing that?” Her answer was simple. “Well, we don’t know exactly what Jesus looked like, but I am sure he looked more like you than he looked like me.”
“As a young child, I, like all great missionaries, was eager to take the weight of the world on my shoulders. I pressed my cheek to the rock of the world, the vast and great hordes of unbelievers. What shall I tell them? About Jesus, of course. What would I say? I would figure that out when I got there. The great narratives told around me were primarily of going; there was not much conversation regarding what was to be said. What they didn’t tell me is that it is only the young and the foolhardy who try to convert others. It is the bright-eyed and dewy-skinned who clutch at the books that they read, the doctrines lined up just so; they are the ones with all the right answers. Never mind their loneliness and doubts, fears and the pressure to be a little Christ, to emulate their master without offending as he so often did. They are to do His job better, to convince and plead and wheedle, to have enough faith to do it all. I tried to do it. It never worked, but that was no bother to me. This was a sign of being a prophet: no one ever listens to you. It never occurred to me what it might be like to receive lessons about death and God and the unbearable weight of existence from a nineteen-year-old girl who was entirely sure of herself.”
“Then the real question emerges, the one that has been here all along: what exactly is it that I am trying to convert people into?”
“A few years previously, I was the guardian of those wild packs of kids, the eager volunteer. I would have made a big show of talking to the boys, hovering and helpful, stern when I needed to be, setting good boundaries. A part of me loved the stares I got, tramping around this city with all the colorful kids in tow. In the beginning, when there was so much tangible need, I felt gratified to be part of making their present more bearable. It was only later I realized that the present never mattered much to them, and I never had quite the starring role I thought I did. It was hard for me to give up on myself, on my own future dreams that hinge on me saving people, converting others, changing all the wrongs into rights. I have wild thoughts like, if I just could have done more—more homework clubs, job education course, Jesus film showings, prayer times—then I could have done something. Then maybe my friends would not be moving away. People I adore would not get lost in violence, or get married at age fifteen, or be crushed by debt the rest of their lives. In the weird way that nostalgia works, I am casting myself as a hero of sorts in our narratives. But underneath my histrionics is the unsettling reality that I am not needed anymore, and if I am, then I don’t have the strength to do it.”
“I was still an outsider, but at least I had a couple of years of living with my neighbors in mind under my belt. I was probably doing everything badly, but others would probably do it worse. The problem was that, I too, in my heart of hearts, still believed that I was bringing good to the ‘hood. I had just learned not to put it on a t-shirt anymore.”
“If you stay long enough you will learn just enough about the brokenness of the world that you will feel completely powerless, mired in your own brokenness and doubting God more often than you care to admit. It is easier to leave right after the prayers are prayed, right after someone meets Jesus, while the tears are still fresh and the hope is solid enough to cut with a knife. We, the do-gooders, stay for a short while, because we crave the knowledge that we have done something of value in the world. And we leave before we have a chance to see how poor in relationships we really are. I have done this do-gooder work for years now, what I thought were valiant, honorable efforts, but what was more often than not just a roundabout way of trying to come to terms with the inequalities in our world. And I’ve learned how dipping our toes in the pool of humanity—going and helping and doing—actually impoverishes and deceives us. For a few days, weeks, and months, we allow ourselves to see the other side. We swing from the ends of helplessness to arrogance, back and forth. We become zealots, lovers, missionaries, and activists. We read articles, pause and let the words sink in, stare at the pictures until they are burned in our brains. And then we forget. No one can live in that tension forever, and soon enough you will be able to forget.”
“But when I become the bit part, the background player in a much larger saga, I find my true role, which is this: to swallow my own impulse to save and to focus on the long game. To be a friend, the truest form of advocacy there is.”
“I thought about the countless conversations about colleges and careers, the introduction of Disney preteen media and “follow your dreams” mantras, the talks about Jesus and how much he loves and values women, my harping on equitable marriages, on waiting to have children, on finishing high school. As I drove away from the wedding (of her friend at age 16), there was only one thought in my head: what if I had made everything worse?”
“That people prefer themselves and all others like them is no surprise to any of us, but I am consistently taken aback at how often we refuse to acknowledge that our systems might have the same kind of problem. Being a minority where I work and live and play has opened my eyes to the way systems (political and religious) are intrinsically for me. This never bothered me until I realized what the converse of that equation is: those systems are actively against others.”
“But really, when it comes down to it, I was scared that God might ask me to wave my own freakish, shimmering flag around—to declare that He loved all of us, when everything around me seemed to contradict this statement.”
“All I can do is listen and wonder if this is what it means to grow older: the cruelties of the world are no longer surprising.”
“Whether I realized it or not, I absorbed the mindset that this Western method of education was the best way to go about doing anything. You go into debt, you learn from the best, and then you go out and be and teach and do with all you have learned. And this isn’t bad or untrue, not at all. Except for that one teeny tiny problem that I started to discover burrowed deep beneath all the years of enlightenment thinking that my culture and my church had swallowed like so much honey: Jesus never said those things.”
“Beneath all of that seemingly “good” stuff was a girl who had placed herself on a pedestal, someone who believed I am destined for something special, because I am special. Those books about my heroes only reinforced this, as did my Christian culture around me. There are some people who go out and do BIG things for God, and I knew in my heart that I just happened to be one of them. And it was unspoken, of course, but the flip side of this belief was an ugly little hierarchy, a drive to be out on the top that came more from desperation than idealism: I am special because I have to be. Because God loves special more.”
“The scriptures show us time and time again what the first signs of sin and idolatry are: the poor are forgotten, they are downtrodden and oppressed.”
“I was angry, my heart a flame of indignation and jealousy and something that very much felt like sorrow. For if God could truly delight in a person like David, then why was I trying so damn hard? It was because I never believed I had earned his love after all. But like the smallest of seeds, an idea began to grow: what if it was all true? What if God loved everybody, exactly the same? What if there were no hierarchies, no gold stars, no way to spill or waste or fritter away or lose the love of the Almighty? When I asked God about all this, he told me some hard and true things, which amounted to what I had heard my whole life but didn’t have the wherewithal to actually believe: God loves everybody, exactly the same. No matter what you do.”
“The father (of the prodigal son), full of sadness and mercy, tells his older son—so good, so bitter—a simple thing. “My son,” he says, looking the boy full in the eyes, “You are always with me, and everything I have is available to you.” He doesn’t need to add what by now I knew: it was always available to him, all along. Being near the Father is a constant party-in-progress, a constant chance to experience the benefits of being in community. But we can choose to opt out of it, to work tirelessly for an idea of what our Father wants, instead of spending time with him.”
“Being a witness is harder than anything I have ever done. And he is asking all of us to do this task, to simultaneously see the realities of our broken world and testify to the truth that all is not well. To be a witness to the tragedy, to be a witness to the beauty. He is asking us to drop everything and run, run in the direction of the world’s brokenness. And he is asking us to bring cake.”
“We aren’t being asked to assimilate, but we are called to make our home here more like the kingdom we have always dreamed about but were too scared to believe was possible.”
