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| Damian and Grace, Moses and Gloryann |
It’s not okay with me, seems a precarious theme for us right now. In mulling over my thoughts, I have found that I tend to one of a few extremes. On the one hand, there arises a substantial temptation to use this opportunity to try and impress all of you with how much we are daily sacrificing for the gospel. In this case the intro would sound a little like,
“It is not okay with me that our often-faulty elevators forced us to trounce up and down twelve flights of stairs today on our way to our fourth different church location in two months where there was no heat or power for most of the service. Oh, and by the way, it was -20° F when we left. If you have not experienced -20° F, just know it is the point at which your nose hairs freeze together and begin falling out.”
Notice how here I conveniently left out the part about grumbling most the way and beating on and kicking the elevator doors repeatedly for not working. In fact, I didn’t even feel ashamed until Moses (our 2 ½ year-old son) mimicked my immaturity by releasing some of his own little fists of fury on the old hibernating dinosaur while exclaiming / repeating “stupid elevators!” At this point feel free to think, “it’s not okay with me that one of our M’s overseas is modeling this type of behavior to his son!”
On the other hand, we face the temptation of casting a similar faulty image of super-sainthood, but from the opposite perspective. That would be to insinuate that we’re actually “okay” with things that most people would not be “okay” with because God has called us, equipped us, and empowered us to overcome by walking in the Spirit, claiming His blood and victory, and / or using every other Christianese cliché we can think of. This kind of entry would probably begin,
“It’s not okay to be not okay with all the temporary and miniscule struggles we face here designed to help us identify with Christ’s suffering on the cross and to grow us in faith, character, and hope so that we more accurately resemble and reflect His glorious image. We are at peace with it all!”
The problem here is that we sometimes are not even“ok” (or “at peace” as we say in church) with basic normalcy. Little things do bug us – cultural misunderstandings, constantly being treated like outsiders, corruption, lack of common courtesy and politeness, horrible air quality, fireworks blasting outside our window all night for weeks before and after new years, etc. Don’t get us wrong, we love our calling, but as humbling as it is to admit, we are still learning how to live in it with the courage of faith to love this culture well.
The last extreme temptation is to exclude the things we are not okay with that we are still trying to figure out ourselves. For example, we have no idea how to love our neighbor after having stumbled upon him physically abusing his wife in a drunken stupor outside our door. We still don’t know how to respond to repeated racist remarks when people hear Grace and the kids speaking Chinese. And we are perplexed and grieved for our closest national friend – who is like a grandmother to our kids- being blinded by a sham eye operation and repeatedly manipulated, coerced, and scammed for money while she desperately tries to recover through a corrupt and inept medical system. We know we are not okay with these things, but honestly we are still trying to figure out what God is calling us to do about them and how. We desperately need your prayers for how to incarnate the love of Christ in these difficult and scary situations.
In short, it seems we are not okay with some things that maybe we should be, okay with some things that we probably should not be, and certainly not okay with things we still are not certain about. How’s that for an inspiring peek into the life of your Park Street M’s life? However, in all this we can honestly testify to the fact that we are grateful for our calling. And we are in good company. Though Jesus was grieved with exactly that which grieved the Father’s heart, his sweating blood in the garden demonstrates that he did not have some kind of magical peace about going to the cross. Thank You Lord for not being okay with our lives apart from you!
Damian serves in Central Asia
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