A continuing need (65/100)

On my Sabbath days during this 100-day journey, I have tried to engage in activities that are less like work (though seldom does any of this feel like work). The strategic plans, business development, and even programming are laid down for a day. Leaving with intention these things are placed in the hands of Jesus to hold for a day.

Today this has taken the form of starting a new book to read for fun. I have been wanting to read more about and stuff from Amy Carmichael. She seems like an amazing woman who served as a missionary at the turn of the last century in Asia. In searching Google Books (My favorite new source for reading materials because its FREE.), I ran across her book, Things as They Are (1906).

In this book, Carmichael depicts the reality of the response of the people of southern India to the Gospel. Commentators on her book state similar things as the following:

This book... meets a real need -- it depicts a phase of mission work of which, as a rule, very little is heard. Every missionary can tell of cases where people have been won for Christ, and mention incidents of more than passing interest.... the danger is... the impression should be given that they represent the normal state of things, the reverse being the case. (p. vi)

At the beginning of the first chapter a missionary to India and Arabia states, "There is too little desire to know what is the actual state of mission work in India, and a regard to the showy and attractive rather than to the solid and practical" (p.1).

And so, if this is how it was in the early 1900s, how is it now? How pressured do our current cross-cultural workers feel obliged to share the good and diminish the struggles both in the work and in their own lives? This speaks to the motivation for our ministry of Resilience. Our goals include individualized care because each person is unique with their own story that needs space and safety to be told, and unique pains and struggles that merit a personal response.

Will any of these personal aspects be revealed in this book? Only continued reading will show this. However, the generalized support from the mission community of the time when this book was first published certainly testifies to a very human state that is likely still present today as captured by another commentator:

That [Amy Carmichael] has painted a dark picture... cannot be denied, but... I rejoice that she had the courage to do what was so much needed, and yet, what so many of us shrank from doing. (p. v)

Lord, cause us to not deny the truth pushing it to either side, but cause us to create a place of safety for our brothers and sisters to be real in the context of a loving community interested in God's work being accomplished in and through them as unique gifts to this world.