Doing Missions Means Calling Yourself a Missionary

(Watch or read this blog)

Personally, I refused to call myself a missionary until I was “on the field” for many years already. I had grown up reading biographies of great missionaries like George Muller and Amy Carmichael and Hudson Taylor—and I knew that wasn’t me. I was simply following the green lights God had on my path—and loving it—was I supposed to be enjoying myself so much?

They actually called me “The Intern who kept coming back.” I called myself an EFL teacher. I was in Brazil 6 months and the USA 6 months a year because of visa problems, but also because I was mostly self-supported and worked my butt off in the USA to spend it all in Brazil. I was living off of $350 a month—or less. It was a great life for a single person who wanted to travel and live and make a difference.

But then I had a dear friend sit me down and ask me about my long term plan. About sustainability. And most tenderly, why I was scared to call myself a missionary: did I not think that I was good enough? I also had a cousin who came and visited me in Brazil. She looked me in the eye and said “I have visited a lot of missionaries and seen a lot of ministries: you are doing a good job. What you are doing is important and valuable.”

I was easily putting in 60-70 hour work weeks. I ate and breathed missionary work. It was my life. And slowly, I began to realize that I was a workman “worth his hire.” I could call myself a missionary, even if I didn’t look like everything in my head that was a missionary. Even if I didn’t know the future, and how long I’d be serving abroad.

Language is crazy. We connect emotions, expectations, and experiences to words until they almost become their own entity (consider all that comes up when you hear the word “Mother” or “Father”). The word “Missionary” in my mind was someone who left and never came back. It was someone who had a prayer card on everyone’s refrigerator and spoke at missionary conferences and knew what they were talking about. They always had stories of miracles and “GREAT WORKS,” all in capital letters. And I didn’t fit into this missionary narrative.

"The word missionary comes from the Latin word mitto, which means "to send." It is the equivalent of the Greek word apostello, which also means "to send." The root meaning of the two words is identical (Herbert Kane, The Making of a Missionary, ISBN: 081053587, p. 13) Unfortunately, this word “mitto” was also used and historically rooted in the sending out of merchant ships to bring back slaves and colonize the developing world. Many other people have very sad and angry associations with the word “Missionary.”

After 15 years of (now I can say) being a missionary, missions to me means how I live my life. It involves washing dishes a lot more than I thought it would. It is a lot of paperwork and what seems like wasted time as I navigate a second language and a second culture. But I also have the opportunity to work with and serve people I never would have been able to meet otherwise. I get to be a part of incredible stories that God is writing in a different context than my “normal.”