This week’s blog in our 2024 Advent series comes from a Mennonite Mission Network worker in North Africa. Their name and location are withheld due to ministry sensitivity. Mission Network supports workers and partners in many different places around the world, including ones where the local cultural or religious contexts in which they serve prevent public recognition of their names or ministry specifics. Please include these workers and their local partners in your prayers the same way you would Mission Network’s non-sensitive ministries.
“I am not enough.” Well, of course, I don’t feel as if I am enough. I didn’t get through with what I planned for this day, this week, this year; I perhaps didn’t finish what I started. Maybe I didn’t even have a plan. And yet, I know I am right where I am supposed to be. So how may I not be enough?
It is just this. II Cor 4:18 says, “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” If we are looking primarily to the checkmarks in our agendas for our success or failure, are we really getting this? I remember a statement I heard in childhood at the end of a day: “I feel so good. I got so much accomplished.” The world’s view.
Whereas, if you come to a country such as ours, in North Africa—rarely does anything go according to plan. You may feel much more compelled to live like the verse! And I sometimes think about how much I missed living in the United States.
I find it so much more challenging, every single day now. Nearly every Uber ride, I am praying for the driver to just get to me (I see him in the app, sitting at some intersection possibly debating, do I go through with this ride?). Or I am praying for him to get me there safely OR that he finds Jesus, somehow (it not being appropriate for me to speak to him). Aha, you say, “Does she not pray for his soul on every single Uber ride?” Mind you, I am not so “spiritual” that I can regularly claim to have prayed thus (sometimes, I just wanted to get out of there with my life intact).
And then, however, at the end of the day, what do I judge my worth against?
I planted some seeds, today. I don’t know if they were accepted, received, or even if the soil was ready for them, yet. All I know is “I planted.” If, according to scripture, I was “sowing to the Spirit”, then I will reap life. I am looking to the unseen—that little seed thrown out there, perhaps blown away by the wind, waiting to come to a rest, somewhere. Perhaps resting atop fertile soil, waiting, waiting.
I used to hate waiting. It was my least favorite thing to do—I would be late somewhere, just because I wanted to only “be on time” and not have to wait. Yet, through the practice of Advent in our church in Denver, there was this embrace of the wait. This dark, hidden time. Even the darkness in our sanctuary, broken only by candles, embodied the darkness of the womb of Advent. This time, waiting with Mary for the birth of her son. This time of being with God—in a completely different way.
God is a God of the waiting. God waits for our hearts to soften, so He may fulfill His best plan for us. God waits to do His work in the hearts of those we pray for, who seem so adamantly against any of His plans. He waits because He is the respectful Father, who doesn’t barge in, uninvited, to control or invade. The hovering God, waiting in The Very Beginning, to create something out of the formless and empty.
Did you ever notice that God spoke everything into being, except for man? With man, He stooped down and used His Heavenly Hands to form man out of the dust of the earth. Yet, when Jesus came, God again spoke, this time through His Spirit breath in the form of “dust-made” flesh. A baby. The baby was the seed of His plan. It took 30 long years of waiting before Mary even started to see Him—the seed—do what she knew He had come to do. What she had suffered: a very lonely and shame-laced engagement and a family-less delivery to bring Him forth. All that for what? To wait? Yes, and to wait, once more.
