On my magpie soul. And some stories.

Matthew 13:52

For this reason every scribe discipled to the kingdom of the heavens is like a householder who brings forth out of his treasure things new and old.

Gonna share about something old and new.

Growing up in an adopted land, my relatives were slightly less than strangers, but I’d hear snippets about them from my parents. This one does this-and-that; your cousin got into _____! Did you hear about _____? I didn’t care much to hear about many of them, except for one aunt. My mother always talked about how similar we were in disposition, in priorities, and in unwillingness to exercise. She was not a businesswoman, teacher, or homemaker—she and her husband moved to the former Soviet Union after its dissolution, and worked full-time to establish the church and take care of the new believers there. Though my mom fussed over how frail they seemed to become on a steady diet of cabbage, potatoes, and the occasional carrot (perhaps accounts were dramatized), they seemed to have had unshakeable joy in what they did. I didn’t see other joy like that as a child.

So I thought that the highest work for God must be as a missionary. I idolized their spartan lifestyles of altar and tent. How nice must it be not even to have to carry two tunics or even a bag for the journey (Matt. 10)! After all, from dust we came, and to dust we return. We’re sojourners on the earth, because we eagerly await a city which has the foundations, whose Architect and Builder is God (Heb. 11:10). Growing up, though, I didn’t see the city. I just really liked the tent. So I shortsightedly assigned great value to the ability to suffer. And the scripture, when taken from the standpoint of human effort, just enabled my pseudo-asceticism.

1 Pet. 4:1, “Since Christ therefore has suffered in the flesh, you also arm yourselves with the same mind.”

2 Cor. 5:8, “We are of good courage then and are well pleased rather to be abroad from the body and at home with the Lord.”

1 Cor. 9:27, “I buffet my body and make it my slave.”

Luke 10:8, “Eat what is set before you.”

I started trying to fashion myself after my mythic ideal self, one accomplishment at a time. Use things until they’re broken and mended and broken again? Check. Travel with almost nothing? Check. Bear cold temperatures in insufficient clothing? Check. Sleep in uncomfortable places? Check. Eat the same foods every day for months? Check. There’s more, but I want to retain what few friends have stuck with my blagoblag for this long.

Side note, going to the remote villages in Madagascar partly satisfied my masochistic leanings. My hungry ego patted itself on the back every time rural living left a mark on my body: flea bites, blisters, calluses, cuts and bruises, a terrific shoulder tan. It took a raw pleasure out of drinking river water and finding grit swilling at the bottom of the mug, and traipsing through ankle deep mud in sandals in the rain and the sore calves and thighs of days-long hikes and squatting everywhere in villages (ain’t nobody got chairs).

I also hated myself for taking so much pride in these things. I knew full well that no matter how “woke” I could claim to be, I was little more than a tourist, eager to “rough it like the locals” for a short while and leave feeling like I’ve done something for humanity. I wanted nothing to do with that narrative, and yet there I was, puppeteered down to my unconscious thoughts. Privilege is being able to slip in and out of their grueling daily reality like a pair of flip flops, and recall it fondly as an “enriching experience.” The fact that that phrase has the word rich in it turns my stomach.

Anyway. Through the years I’ve grown to see that travail for its own sake is nothing but an exercise of perfecting one’s flesh. Yes, Paul wrote of suffering bodily, but he tempered this by repeatedly asserting that he had no confidence in his flesh, but that all those experiences were merely “a momentary lightness of affliction” that works out an eternal weight of glory. His eyes weren’t fixed on the asperity of his environment, but on matters of eternal weight. All the rest, his hunger, beatings, shipwrecks, stonings, imprisonment, all —Paul refers to these not to tout his own endurance, but rather to show forth the power of Christ tabernacling in him, bringing him through (2 Cor. 11-12). With such a One living in us and as our comfortable home in such uncomfortable places, can these things be considered suffering? Paul even sang hymns of praise to God in prison (Acts 16:25). It’s a starkly different scene from self-administered deprivation and self-aggrandizing grubbing for self-glory.

I know all that. I know having such accomplishments as boasts in my flesh are useless. But like a magpie, I could tell my soul was gathering brags like so much glittering bric-a-brac. I love the Lord, and my life is for His work to build the church and return, but I wanted also to be a super tough and ready-for-anything person, too (my interpretation of the modifier “sendable”). I could aim for both, right?

It wasn’t until I visited some brothers and sisters in South Africa that I got some real recalibration.

My first week, I stayed with a couple who had been missionaries in Tunisia, Madagascar, and Namibia. I was so impressed with that resumé that I found myself looking for hints of their former life in their house, and picked their brains for stories of daring escapades and close escapes (they did have a few). But what got me was they never mentioned much of what they lacked, though it’s obvious that in their line of work, they must have lacked much. The wife off-handedly mentioned when I asked about her rice that they used to have a rice cooker — they lost it when they left everything behind in a certain country (the police did not want missionaries, so they had to move on short notice). You could tell the loss of the rice cooker, of this or that possession or a house or income or clothing, those things had become just a lightness of affliction. Hardly anything to shake a twig at in the face of God’s mighty outpouring from eternity to eternity.

My second week, I stayed with a few more families and couples. (read: so. Many. Kids.) I also got to join trainees from Full-Time Training in Pretoria as they studied, spent time with students at Tuks, dunked rusks in rooibos, and watched a series of videos, an exposition of the book of Leviticus. All week, I heard testimonies of people finding Christ and the Church through the least probable avenues. For some who lived in low-income countries, without much chance to hear precious truths like God becoming a man to make man God, He had to bring them to China to study abroad and meet them there. Many of these ones then return to their countries, and through them the Lord has a beachhead. I had thought that “preaching the gospel to the whole inhabited earth” was circumscribed wholly by missionary outreach. But God’s ways, infinitely higher, showed me that the normal church life in China, in South Africa, even in New York City, is part of His move to reach the uttermost parts of the earth. Hallelujah! It’s a privilege untold to be His at any price.

One of the video messages we watched was a soul-stirring, liberating, jubilant message on the Feast of Jubilee in Leviticus, which typifies that the Christian life today is one of rejoicing, liberation, and recovery of our once-lost possession: God Himself. At the start of His ministry, Jesus tells all the listeners at the temple that the prophecy of the jubilee has been fulfilled in their hearing, as He Himself was there to proclaim liberty to the captives, recovery of sight to those who are blind. The age since His ascension until His return is the acceptable year of Jehovah. I had entered the message after a confusing night of doubts and roiling thoughts. But in point after point, the message delineated every privilege bequeathed to us in our Christian life that was a fulfillment of the type of the Jubilee, and by the end of the message I felt like if I didn’t praise the Lord, the mountains, the cumulonimbus clouds, the oceans!—would cleave open in praise to Him as well.

Then I caught a ride home with a sister, and once the passenger door closed, I could tell from the change in atmosphere that she wasn’t as enthused. She shared on the ride home. In the video message, we saw trainees from the Full-Time Training in Anaheim, arrayed in navy and white, who were as visibly excited by the message as I was. She had been one of those, (more than?) a decade ago, in the very same uniform, in the same place, with the same atmosphere. She didn’t have four sons then, diapers to change, boys to peel off trees and scrapes to clean, tantrums to defuse, dishes to wash, laundry every morning, bills to pay, a house to clean… in the Training, she just had herself and God to worry about. As much as she appreciated and believed in the truth of the message on the freedom in Christ, she envied the young people’s naïveté in claiming such facts. In her experience, she just couldn’t see how that transient elation of the message could possibly hold fast to the next morning, when her toddler was throwing all the dried laundry on the dew-dropped grass. Again. Probably strapped to a stinky diaper, too.

I had no idea what to say. The truths are no less real—this we both believed. If they’re real in liberating me from my level 1 bonds, they must also be real in liberating my sister from her level 5(? 10? 100?) bonds. God strengthens us, not according to the poverty of our situation, but according to the riches of His glory (Eph. 3:16), a universal constant. But how do we tap into those riches when the troubles aren’t acute (like mine), but rather chronic and seemingly unceasing?

I also had lunch with another sister, whose three sons were about my age. She had emigrated to South Africa without any expectations of what she would face and what she would have to do. Her only job description was to serve God. Her husband dropped his job to serve God full-time, which meant he was always flying all over Africa and sometimes Asia to meet with Christians. Every few weeks he would have to leave home. His wife served God by making sure her husband was absolutely, utterly free to do so. She worked; she raised her sons; she opened her home for believers to meet; she cleaned the meeting hall; she cooked and entertained and gave hospitality to visitors. Her sons grew up and one by one left home. She told me that since moving to Pretoria, a whopping 24 years, besides visiting her sick mother in Taiwan, she had had only one chance to travel anywhere for leisure. One. She bid her husband goodbye countless times to travel the world (albeit working); one son lived in Germany for a semester; another studied in Taiwan and Hong Kong. And she was there, in my eyes, shackled to the church.

But that was how I considered her story. The way she told it, she gave me no sense of suffering in her decades of service. In fact, it was her glory, her joy, to care for God’s work. She did not even suggest that she in any way had missed out by choosing to live her life in this way; she had gotten the better part. After the message on the Jubilee, she stood up and shared, and her words had such gravity in the light of her testimony: “the real freedom in the Christian life is in the mingled spirit. When we touch our spirit, everything in the Jubilee is real to us.”

I could tell that when this sister said everything, it meant more than if I said everything.

God desires all men to come to the full knowledge of the truth (1 Tim 2:4), but full knowledge is more than just the expounded Word of God, I realized in my week in Pretoria. That doctrinal foundation must be built upon by layer after layer, day after day of momentary lightnesses of affliction to work out, more and more surpassingly, an eternal weight of glory.