Mission Work during Motherhood

Impossible, right?  An opportunity for a mother of young children to go on a missionary trip would be rare. So we stay here, becoming accustomed to mommy survival mode. We’re steeped in blessings on our journey toward our Promised Land, and surrounded by loved ones and Christians. The life of a mother of young kids is not easy by any means, but it certainly is blessed. I sometimes find myself complaining about ridiculous things: Anna’s won’t take a bottle, Jay gets home too late in the evenings, and Claire has suddenly become shy, sometimes even rude, to friends and family.

While studying Hebrews 3 last night, I realized that the plight of the children of Israel wandering through the wilderness has some startling similarities to my own journey: I’m so blessed and protected that it’s tempting to lose my thankfulness, and begin grumbling about minute things. For the children of Israel, it was that they were tired of manna, the food that God gave to them each day–no chopping, sauteing, or even microwaving required!  We family cooks can surely appreciate that miracle. And yet the Israelites grew tired of this blessing. So God sent them so many quail that much of the meat spoiled and began to stink up their camp. Despite their long, tough journey, the Israelites were truly blessed and protected by God. And yet they lost faith, and an entire generation of them did not get to enter the Promised Land.

This situation should truly frighten we blessed mothers. Yes, our journey is often difficult, but look at all God provides for us! We must not fail to thank Him and love Him through worship and obedience daily for that. An important way to help us remember to do this is to live outside our blessed bubble. We can’t do this physically when we have young children, but we can do it through reading and prayer. I love to read The Christian Chronicle, the international newspaper of the churches of Christ for many reasons, but one is its updates and stories from the mission field. These stories never fail to open my eyes to my own blessings, and that dramatic stories of faith, like we find in the Bible, are still being enacted around the world today. This one tells about a woman whose story reminds me of the apostle Paul’s: Fanaah Radebe had trained since she was a young girl to be a witchdoctor, a pagan healer. One day she became deathly ill as a result of part of her training. While Fanaah lay in bed, her sister read to her daily from the Bible, and her uncle visited her and prayed for her. After she got well, Fanaah became a Christian, and today shares the Gospel and her testimony with others in South Africa.

People everywhere are not so blessed as us. Our mission for today might be raising our children, but we must not take this blessed time for granted, or begin to complain about our small hardships. That ungrateful heart is a open door to a hard heart. Through prayer and reading, we can travel abroad and realize how blessed we are, thanking God for that, and praying for people like Fanaah, for her strength and the strength of other missionaries to reach other souls who need Christ. Don’t give in to the temptation to grumble about things that aren’t truly trials, but just a result of our own inability to recognize God’s provision and care for us. Your mission: raise godly children. Accept it with a grateful heart.