Dangerous Territory

by Amy Peterson

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. He had never had any strong, specific career ambitions. “But I’ve always looked forward to the day when I’m a grandfather, and I’m just sitting on the front porch, drinking sweet tea and playing guitar.”

  Jack had told me about his grandparents, the house they owned on Ed’s Lake Road. When he was in college in the mountains of Tennessee, he’d drive an hour to spend weekends with them, helping with odd jobs around their property, suiting up and harvesting honey from their bee hives. To Jack, his grandparents were a picture of how a quiet, simple life could be beautiful. They weren’t likely to talk much about their faith, he said, but they lived with such kindness and joy that you didn’t need to ask.

  So when he said he wanted to be a grandfather, I knew what he was saying: that the things that would make his life meaningful were not great achievements, as some might measure them, but small joys: a happy family, a creaky porch swing, an ice cold drink on a humid summer evening, fireflies and honey.

  And suddenly my way of measuring achievement, ambition, and success seemed wrong-headed, maybe even petty. There was another way to understand life: it was not only about accomplishment. It was not only about the things you did: it was about the person that you became.

  What I needed was not a Leader; someone stronger than I was in every way, someone competing in the same race that I was, but always just a little bit faster. What I needed was a companion in whom I could see the fruits of the Spirit that I hoped would develop in myself as well.

  And Jack was patient. I had never seen him angry. He was kind. In groups, he quietly and consistently looked for the person on the margins, the one who might be feeling left out, and made sure that person was included. His manner was characterized by peace; there was a steadiness and stability to him that reassured me. He was diligent and responsible; he did his grad school work, and he went to class on time. He was humble, never expecting special treatment, wary of too much attention. He took great pleasure in the small beauties of the world: a well-framed photograph, the right word choice in a poem, a clever rhyme in a song lyric, the flavor of mint and cilantro in a noodle dish. He wasn’t the kind of leader who grasped for power, who sought out roles of authority and influence: he was the kind of leader people naturally gravitated toward because of the kindness, integrity, and joy that radiated from him.

  “God gives gifts to his children, and he knows which gifts will be most pleasing to which children. You are God’s perfect gift to me,” Jack later wrote in a letter to me.

  He was not what I had thought I needed: he didn’t have savvier theological arguments, higher test scores, more “spiritual success,” or any desire to be the guy on stage. In him there was not an ounce of pretension or hypocrisy. Maybe I hadn’t needed a “leader” at all; just someone to walk through life with, enjoying every one of God’s good gifts together.

  29

  Gethsemane

  We must follow in his footprints. The pioneer missionary, in overcoming obstacles and difficulties, has the privilege not only of knowing Christ and the power of his resurrection, but also something of the fellowship of his suffering.

  Samuel Zwemer

  Conference ended, and we went back to work. Jack came to visit me. We went to the beach with his teammate Greg, ate Indian food, and flipped through racks of pirated CDs in a shop that catered to backpacking American twentysomethings.

  Later, I visited him. I hadn’t been sure I’d be able to reenter his country, but going to the embassy for a visa, I inadvertently went to the “back door,” getting an expedited, under-the-table document. I took a bus to a shuttle to the border, got food poisoning, threw up on the side of the road, and got in yet another vehicle, riding in the open back of a pickup to the next border crossing. But eventually I made it. Jack and I cooked together and watched Hitchcock films and kissed in a hammock on the porch.

  We’d met each other’s students. We’d made mistakes; we’d forgiven each other. We slowed down; we sped up. I put on Dr Pepper lip balm for our Yahoo video chats once a week; Jack proved he could handle long distance, e-mailing me almost every day.

  I was in love but, shockingly, romantic happiness did not cause all the other complications of my life to disappear. My relationship with God remained mysterious and confusing.

  It was true that God’s silence had ended; I was praying now, and hearing God answer my prayers. One afternoon, stressed about the future and career decisions, I went for a long walk downtown, along the Tonle Sap River. I was in a neighborhood I rarely visited, but I wished I could find someone to counsel me, to speak into my distress. I asked God to let me run into Heather. Minutes later, I saw her walking toward me.

  When I had doubts about Jack, I prayed about them, and his next e-mails would often directly address the questions I’d laid before God.

  But these answers to prayer, encouraging as they were, didn’t help me understand why God had absconded when Veronica was arrested. I wanted God to explain himself! I wanted God to prove to me that he cared about Veronica and was with her, as he was with me.

  As Easter Sunday approached, I found myself lingering in the shadows of the Garden of Gethsemane, thinking about God’s silence in the face of Veronica’s suffering.

  A good friend had once confessed to me that she found herself praying a prayer for me that made her bite her tongue. She’d starting praying from Philippians 3: “God, I ask that Amy would know Christ, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of sharing—” and then she stopped, wondering if she could really ask for another person to know the fellowship of sharing in Christ’s sufferings. Should she? Did she have the slightest idea of what she might be requesting with such a prayer?

  Yet Paul clearly desired it for himself—he wanted to “know Christ, and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection of the dead” (Philippians 3:10).

  What does it mean to share in Christ’s sufferings—to become like him “in his death”?

  A year before, I hadn’t been thinking about Christ’s suffering so much as his glory. A year before, you would have found me outside the empty tomb, or running to find the disciples, or waiting expectantly in the upper room. You would have found me exulting in the resurrection, and the new life I’d seen in Veronica, Sarah, and Cecilia.

  But this Easter, I was lingering over Christ’s passion, feeling the emotions that T. S. Eliot captures so well:

  After the torchlight red on sweaty faces

  After the frosty silence in the gardens

  After the agony in stony places

  The shouting and the crying

  Prison and palace and reverberation

  Of thunder of spring over distant mountains

  He who was living is now dead

  We who were living are now dying

  With a little patience.

  I stayed in this scene not because I couldn’t find faith to believe in the next, but because the passion of Christ had never meant as much to me. I thought back over the previous year.

  I’d prayed, the summer before in Chicago, that God would teach me to be emotionally open to him. I loved God with my mind and strength and soul, but I didn’t love him with my heart. I didn’t know how. I asked God to bring me into a real relationship with him—to give me a heart that loved him.

  But there was no change in my heart, and as summer bumped up against fall, I found out that I couldn’t return to Veronica and her university. All my plans for the year were thwarted and my heart was broken, not only because I couldn’t return but also because those sweet girls had lost their Bibles, their faith in each other, and the uncomplicated joy of salvation. They faced opposition before they had even really begun. In confusion, I’d taken what felt like the only option open to me, and moved to Cambodia.

  I
had prayed, and I tried to see purpose. I had prayed and asked God to open my heart to him. I asked him to teach me to surrender completely to him and to his plan. But I doubted everything about the work I was supposed to be doing in Cambodia, and walked through my days empty and faithless. I asked for answers.

  I had heard no answers. My heart remained hard, and my doubts only multiplied. My prayers, more and more rarely offered, never pierced the blue-bowl ceiling of the sky, just littering the field around me, abandoned shafts and feathers.

  God was silent.

  From the Garden of Gethsemane to the cross, God was also silent. While his Son (his beloved Son, in whom he was well-pleased) prayed, sweating blood, asking for the cup to be removed, God was silent. When his Son cried in agony, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God was silent.

  German Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann writes:

  Christ’s true passion begins with the prayer in Gethsemane which was not heard, which was rejected through the divine silence. . . . This godforsakenness is the cup which he is not spared.

  The scandal and the glory of our faith is that it hinges on this most awful moment in history, when God forsook God; when the deepest cry of anguish the earth has heard was met with silence. Our God, alone of all the gods, experienced the full extent of human suffering.

  Moltmann continues:

  A real answer to this question [“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”] cannot be a theoretical answer beginning with the word “Because.” It has to be a practical answer. An experience of this kind can only be answered by another experience, not by an explanation.

  Christ’s question was answered, three days later, with resurrection. Not an explanation, but an answering experience. And the answer to human suffering and my impassioned cry of “why?” is also not a theoretical explanation. It is an experience. It is a relationship. Job asked why, and God didn’t answer. Habakkuk asked why, and God didn’t answer. God says in his silence: answers won’t satisfy you. Only relationship can satisfy you.

  I had asked God, way back in July, to teach me something about loving with my heart, not just with my mind and my will. I would not have guessed that God would answer by absconding, by silence. But after a semester of silence, I suddenly found I’d learned to love God.

  I had to learn the feeling of God’s absence to be able to recognize and appreciate his presence. I had to be a faithless servant before I could believe that God’s love for me was not predicated on my usefulness to him. I had to learn that answers didn’t satisfy before I could experience the relationship that does. I had to hate God’s sovereignty before I could rejoice in it. I had to see God as wholly transcendent and wholly-other, beyond my ability to comprehend, before I could hear him chuckling in the dark.

  And now I did hear his delightful and infuriating laughter; and now I did see his direct supply of all my needs.

  I lingered in Gethsemane that Easter because for the first time I had tasted a drop of Christ’s suffering, just a fragment of the forsakenness that Christ felt. “Becoming like him in his death”—this might mean, in part, experiencing the suffering that is divine silence. And just as Christ’s self-surrender led to the answering experience of resurrection, it is in our self-surrender—the final, exhausted, empty recognition that we have nothing to bring to God—that he begins to answer by bringing something to us. He gives himself.

  Without realizing it, I had come to exactly the same conclusion that Elisabeth Elliot came to when she considered her first year of overseas work. She had spent a year in a jungle village, studying the local language and creating a written form of it so the Bible could be translated. Near the end of the year, one of her local friends died a seemingly meaningless death. Then, on the train home, her luggage, containing every bit of her translation work, was lost forever. She wrote:

  Each separate experience of individual stripping we may learn to accept as a fragment of the suffering Christ bore when he took it all. “Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” This grief, this sorrow, this total loss that empties my hands and breaks my heart, I may, if I will, accept, and by accepting it, I find in my hands something to offer. And so I give it back to him, who in mysterious exchange gives himself to me.

  I lingered in Gethsemane in glad surrender to the silence of God, the absence of explanation, the answer of relationship.

  Interlude

  The Missionary

  Why are we not all devoted to God; breathing the whole spirit of Missionaries?

  John Wesley

  Mission is putting love where love is not.

  Attributed to St. John of the Cross

  It may be time to retire the word.

  Missionary was first used in the English language in 1625 by Edward Chaloner, a clergyman in the Church of England. He was a preacher, a writer, and an academic. In his work, you find nuanced arguments and a careful attention to words. One of the big questions of his day, for example, was whether the Church of England had been born from the Roman Catholic church, or had originated separately. Chaloner said that it wasn’t an either/or question: the Church of England in its earliest days consisted of reformers who had broken all ties with the Catholic church as well as all who kept in their hearts the simple faith of the early church, whatever denomination they found themselves in. Chaloner valued all truth, staying up to date on scientific developments, quoting ancient philosophers and poets, and studying Roman Catholic theology.

  It’s no surprise that a guy who loved language and the church so much would be the one to introduce the English term missionary, borrowed probably from French (missionnaire) or Spanish (misionero). He died of the plague at age thirty-four, the same year he wrote about Jesuit missionaries.

  I have to wonder what Chaloner, with his love of precision and care for words, would think of the way this word has evolved in the four hundred years since his death.

  In the beginning, missionary had a limited meaning: a celibate male, probably in a Catholic order, probably European, who had made a life commitment to evangelism.

  But almost immediately that definition was complicated by the association of Catholic missionary orders with political colonization. The expansion of God’s kingdom was in many ways conflated with the expansion of territory controlled by Catholic kings, and their quest to acquire land, labor, and raw materials.

  The Protestant missionary movement did little to improve the associations. While Catholic missions had been inextricably bound to political expansion, American Protestant missions were born entwined with corporate-style capitalism. The first missionary boards were structured after secular trading societies, and their values were efficiency, production, and numbers-based assessments.

  The word missionary, then, was born into the English language already weighted down with imperialist and capitalist baggage. It evolved and lost some of the negatives, though it would never shake them entirely, which is part of the reason people still give you the side-eye if you say you’re a missionary.

  The definition changed in some important ways, though, over the next couple of centuries: now the (imperialist, capitalist) missionary was not necessarily a celibate male committed for life; the missionary could be married, could be non-western, could be a woman!

  And then somewhere around the late 1800s or early 1900s the word acquired a new set of connotations. Now missionaries were God’s Special Forces. They were adventure heroes and “grabbers of the impossible,” those who gave up “small ambitions” and went where the “real action” was. And this posed a new set of very current problems for the word.

  The missionary vocation was marketed to a generation of us as the most spiritual vocation. We read biographies that were “high adventure as unreal as any successful novel,” in the words of missionary Nate Saint. Amy Carmichael told us that “God’s true missionary is a Nazarite, who has ‘made a special vow, the
vow of one separated, to separate himself unto the Lord.’” We began to believe that there were “holy” jobs and “ordinary” jobs, that some callings were simply more spiritual. And the music on the video or the conference stage crescendoed while a voice asked us to go, and we felt in our hearts that to go was always more noble than to stay.

  The problem is that we went, and it wasn’t all high adventure. Or we went, and we developed overinflated senses of our own spiritual importance. Or we went, but we were unprepared for the realities of cross-cultural work, ill-equipped to serve in meaningful ways.

  The problem is that we didn’t go, but we believed the fact that we stayed made us second-class Christians. We stayed, so we thought that we were not called to evangelism like the missionaries were.

  No vocation is more spiritual than another. And every Christian is called to share the gospel. But the very existence of the word missionary as it is used today seems to imply otherwise. If missionaries are God’s Special Forces, then evangelism is a calling for some, for the super-spiritual. The rest of us just aren’t called to that.

  The word missionary has become more problematic than helpful. Instead of describing reality, it blurs our vision and limits our imaginations. It has outlived its usefulness, and I vote we give it a proper burial.

  We need new ways of talking about God’s work in the world. It’s true that God is “on mission” to reveal his glory and love to all nations by spreading his kingdom on earth, and that we are to join in that mission, all of us. But God’s mission has never been about counting the number of spiritual conversations you’ve had in a week or valuing street evangelism over changing diapers and formatting spreadsheets. God’s mission has never been about seeing yourself as a spiritual superhero in an action story. God’s mission, as St. John of the Cross said, is to put love where love is not. It’s about relational flourishing.