Not long ago, my Bible-reading plan took me through the book of Lamentations. When I reached the end, I had one immediate thought:

Boy, I could’ve used this when I was a missionary.

The book of Jeremiah warns of and then witnesses Judah’s collapse under divine judgment after generations of unfaithfulness. Lamentations then follows by sitting among the ruins of Jerusalem and grieving what has been lost. Neither book offers the kind of immediate encouragement we often hope to find when we open our Bibles.

We know how to turn to Scripture for answers and reassurance. We are less practiced at allowing Scripture to teach us how to grieve: how to name what has been lost, protest what is broken, and remain open when no resolution has come.

As a cross-cultural worker, I was trained to carry the book of Acts as my textbook. In retrospect, at times Lamentations would have been a more fitting field guide.

To participate in God’s mission is to be drawn close to suffering—our own and that of the people and places we love. It means growing more painfully aware of the distance between the world as it is and the world as God has promised it will be.

The Christian spiritual discipline of lament is how we abide with God in that distance.

When the Warnings Are Not Enough

Cross-cultural transition makes the limits of warning especially visible. Before I moved to East Africa, I had been told that missionary life would be hard. Later, as a pastor, I repeated many of the same warnings to others: language learning may be slow; loneliness will come; ordinary tasks can become exhausting; you might not feel like yourself for a while.

All of this can be true even when arrival is accompanied by genuine joy. A new culture offers beauty, discovery, friendships, and the privilege of entering another way of life. But delight does not cancel disorientation. Within a remarkably short time, missionaries can lose many of the things that once helped them feel grounded: familiar relationships, cultural fluency, vocational competence, daily routines, and the dignity of being understood.

There is, however, a great difference between being told something will hurt and being taught what to do with the pain. Warnings may help us recognize transition shock when it comes, but recognition is not formation. Knowing that grief is normal does not automatically give us a practice of bringing it before God.

Those who cross cultures with the gospel can heighten awareness for this need because so many losses arrive at once. But the need is not unique to them. Any form of following Jesus into the brokenness of the world means absorbing troubles that cannot be quickly solved through preparation, explained away by good theology, or overcome through sheer determination.

The question is not simply whether we have been warned. It is whether we have learned how to abide with God in the mess.

On the eve of his death, Jesus did not merely warn his disciples that sorrow was coming. He gave them words to remember, promised them the presence of the Holy Spirit, and offered them a peace unlike anything the world could give (John 14:25–27). Christian preparation for suffering has always required more than prediction.

A warning can tell us sorrow is coming. It cannot teach us how to sing from within it.

Lament gives grief a song.

The Gift of Lament

This is a song that runs throughout Scripture. Job protests, the psalmists cry out, the prophets grieve, and Jesus takes the anguished words of Psalm 22 upon his lips from the cross. Nowhere, however, is that song sustained more fully than in Lamentations.

We must listen to it carefully. Of course, the disorientation of cross-cultural transition is not equal to the catastrophe that gave birth to these poems. Missionaries generally leave home voluntarily. The people of Jerusalem endured siege, starvation, death, the destruction of their city and temple, and exile under divine judgment. To ignore the difference between those experiences would diminish the suffering Lamentations records.

Yet their grief does not need to be identical to ours for their words to become our companions. Christian mission inherently brings us to places where the distance between the world as it is and the world as God has promised it will be is painfully obvious—often in the lives of those we serve and sometimes in our own lives.

Lamentations teaches us not to look away.

Biblical lament is more than emotional processing. It is worship offered from within that confusing distance. It voices the specific losses, objects to the sense of injustice and confusion, pleads with God to act, and continues addressing him even when there are no answers. Lament gives sorrow sacred dignity without granting it the final word.

The Sound of Lament

Lamentations does not offer a step-by-step process for moving beyond this sorrow.

It’s more like a meandering blues track.

A line is voiced, repeated, bent, and heard again from another angle. The lyrics are raw, yet held within a form sturdy enough to carry them.

The five poems of the book revisit the same devastation through shifting voices, recurring images, and prayers that rise and fall. They return to the ache, sometimes discovering mercy within it and sometimes ending in awkward tension. These are not stages to complete and leave behind. They are movements to which we return as often as grief requires.

Four of those movements are especially worth hearing.

Name What Was Lost

Lament begins with eyes wide open. In the first poem, Jerusalem appears as a widow whose entire world has collapsed:

“Look, O Lord, for I am in distress; my stomach churns; my heart is wrung within me…it is like death” (1:20).

Later, the fourth poem is so bold as to look backward before surveying the devastation:

“Her princes were purer than snow…Now their face is blacker than soot…The hands of compassionate women have [now] boiled their own children” (vv. 7-8, 10).

Again and again, the poet measures the present by what once was. He does not bury his head in the sand. He names the excruciating distance between then and now.

Such comparisons can feel spiritually dangerous. For any of us who have left something behind in missional obedience, we may fear that remembering the past will make us despise the present. We worry that acknowledging what we miss will weaken our resolve to remain. Perhaps we will quit and go home.

But lament is neither nostalgia nor self-pity. It allows us to confess that something good has been lost. Grief does not necessarily mean we regret our obedience; often, it testifies to the worth of what obedience has cost.

Missions culture sometimes says, “Don’t look back.” Lamentations grants us permission to do so—not to retreat into the past, but to tell the hard truth about the present.

Pour Out the Sorrow

The second poem holds together a difficult truth: even though Jerusalem’s judgment is deserved, her lament is justified. Lamentations does not excuse Judah’s rebellion. Yet neither does it tell the grieving city—like a parent might sneer at a child—to take the punishment and like it.

“Arise, cry out in the night, at the beginning of the night watches! Pour out your heart like water before the presence of the Lord!” (2:19)

The image is startlingly unrestrained. Water does not come out in carefully measured drops. God does not shout like Tom Hanks’ character in A League of Their Own, “There’s no crying in baseball!” He says to empty the heart before him.

Those who suffer in the course of obedience often struggle to believe they have that permission. We chose to go. We knew it would be hard. A voice—sometimes our own, sometimes from those around us—says, “Others are suffering far more.” The comparison silences us. We swallow it like some chalky placebo: hard to get down and powerless to heal.

But a gracious Father does not confuse grief with ingratitude. He does not scold his heartbroken child when her balloon floats away. Rather, he draws her into his arms, measuring the loss not by his standards, but hers. Perhaps he feels his fatherhood even more keenly when his shirt is wet with her tears.

Lament is sorrow with an address stamped on it. It pours the heart out not merely into the air, but upon a loving Father.

Wait for Mercy

The third poem opens with Israel as a lonely, broken man: “I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of the Lord’s wrath” (v. 1). By verse 18, he has reached the bottom: “My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the Lord.”

Then, from somewhere inside the rubble, he remembers:

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul,
‘therefore I will hope in him.’
The Lord is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul who seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord.” (vv. 22–26)

These words are not spoken after deliverance arrives. Nothing outside the speaker has changed. What changes is what he calls to mind. Hope enters not as the denial of his anguish, but as the stubborn remembrance of God’s character from within it.

My, how the missionary will wait! Wait to understand and be understood. Wait for unfamiliar faces to become friends. Wait for the body to acclimate to unfamiliar foods and climates—and to recover from yet another illness. Wait for seeds of faithful service to show any sign of life.

Such waiting can feel like wasted time. Lamentations teaches us otherwise. Waiting is not the absence of fruitfulness. It’s where the long, bewildering stretch of bare soil becomes a seedbed of hope.

Refuse a False Resolution

To our surprise, the final poem offers no happy resolution. It closes with a plea in which faith and uncertainty cling to one another:

“Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored!
Renew our days as of old—
unless you have utterly rejected us,
and you remain exceedingly angry with us” (vv. 21–22).

And then, silence. No happily ever after. The final note hangs unresolved.

And according to Holy Scripture, that’s ok.

Yet each time missional people risk sharing their sorrows with me, I notice that they often conclude with something like this:

“...but we’re doing well.”
“...but God has been so kind.”
“...but we know it will all work out.”

I understand the instinct. These are genuine expressions of faith.

But I also wonder if they have become our way of slipping out of grief before it grows uncomfortable—as though God, our supporters, or even we ourselves need reassurance that the sorrow has not gotten the best of us. We tie the bow that Lamentations refuses to tie.

But uncertainty directed toward God is not the opposite of faith. It may, in fact, be the more hard-wrung expression of it. The poet continues speaking to God even when he fears the worst. He pleads, “Restore us,” and then dares to name the terrifying possibility: “unless you have utterly rejected us.”

Lament does not require us to smuggle optimism into the final sentence. It permits the prayer to end while the ache remains. Holding nothing back—anger, confusion, even despair—can itself be an act of gritty trust: the conviction that God would rather receive our anguish than our polish.

In the company of Jesus, we may cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Learning to Remain

Perhaps I am still asking too little of Lamentations. It is more than a companion for surviving cross-cultural transition. It belongs to the whole church. In a sense, we are all learning to live between two worlds.

Acts teaches us to go. Lamentations teaches us how to remain. Both belong to faithful mission.

Name what was lost.
Pour out the sorrow.
Wait for mercy.
Refuse a false resolution.

These do not silence the gospel song. They just keep it honest as we wait.1

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Years ago, when my oldest daughter was two years old, she had an uncanny ability to wake before dawn. More often than I cared to count, she would pad into the living room while the rest of the house still slept, asking to watch her favorite cartoon, Nature Cat. Half awake, I would join her on the couch as the familiar episodes played for what felt like the thousandth time.

One episode in particular, “Gardens of Gold,” still stands out.1

In it, the characters set off in search of a legendary garden they’ve heard to be overflowing with gold. They sing about the “sparkly gold as far as eyes can see” and dream of “endless riches for you and me.” But when they finally arrive, they discover that the treasure isn’t gold at all. It’s actually a field of golden-hued flowers.

The disappointment is almost comical. Every time we watched it, my daughter would furrow her little brow and say, “Daddy, they so sad.”

I’ve thought about that scene for almost a decade. Not because of the cartoon itself, but because I know what it feels like to arrive at a garden expecting gold.

Mine happened to be in East Africa.

I imagined that life there would finally become the life I’d always wanted. I would know God more deeply. My struggles would lose their grip. Every sacrifice would feel meaningful. Adventure would replace ordinary life. People would come to Christ, and somehow that would quiet my restlessness. God would be pleased with me. Perhaps I’d never come home.

Looking back, I wasn’t simply longing to become an effective missionary. I was asking missionary service to become something it was never meant to be.

I had wrapped so much hope around the act of going that I could no longer distinguish God’s calling from my own expectations. Without realizing it, I had already decided what the good life ought to look like. The garden had to contain gold.

The Garden I Found

East Africa turned out to be far better than I could have asked for. It was so much better, in fact, that I almost couldn’t handle it.

When the life I had envisioned failed to materialize, I came dangerously close to despising it. It didn’t matter that God was giving me something better. I couldn’t see it because it wasn’t what I had come looking for.

My teammate was very different from me and often seemed more effective. My days moved more slowly than I had wanted. My struggles with sin hadn’t disappeared. Even participating in seeing many people come to Christ failed to satisfy the deepest ache inside me.

Looking back now, I can see what God was doing.

He was exposing how desperately I needed other people. He was moving me beyond a discipleship built primarily on knowledge. He was teaching me to embrace weakness instead of competence, stillness instead of constant productivity. Most of all, he was gently revealing that not even meaningful ministry could bear the weight of my soul’s needs.

But I couldn’t yet recognize those gifts. I was too busy grieving the life I thought God had promised me.

Without realizing it, I had written my script before I ever boarded the plane to Africa. And I had expected God to follow it instead of inviting me into his.

Reality—even though it was better than my expectations—felt crushing.

Every day presented the same choice: cling to the garden I had pictured, or learn to receive the one God had actually given me.

Expectations and Expectancy

It has taken me years to realize that the problem wasn’t hope. Nor was it desire. It wasn’t even dreaming about what God might do.

After all, none of us follows Jesus without expectation of some kind. We cannot help picturing what obedience might look like. Every invitation from God awakens our imagination. We begin to picture the places we’ll go, the people we’ll meet, and the ways our lives might unfold.

The problem begins when those imagined futures unknowingly become demands.

For years, I told missionary candidates and aspiring pastors, “Don’t have expectations.” I understand now that it wasn’t very good advice. Telling someone not to have expectations is a little like telling them not to dream at night. It’s simply part of being human. The better question is what kind of hope we carry into God’s mission.

Over time, I’ve come to distinguish between expectations and expectancy.

Expectations decide ahead of time what the good life will look like.
Expectancy remains eager without insisting.

Expectations say, This is how God will work.
Expectancy says, I can’t wait to see how God works.

Expectations reach for a particular outcome.
Expectancy simply keeps its hands open.

That was the kind of hope that first drew me toward God’s mission. I lay awake at night imagining the kingdom of God reaching places where Christ was scarcely known. Idealistic? Certainly. But also full of faith.

Somehow along the way, however, it hardened into expectations. And like most expectations, I didn’t even know I had them until they weren’t met.

True Gold

James, the brother of Jesus, eventually learned to hold the future with open hands. He writes:

“Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.’ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.’” (James 4:13–15)

James isn’t condemning plans. He’s exposing our tendency to mistake them for promises.

That is the subtle danger of expectations. They begin as ordinary hopes but slowly harden into assumptions about what God owes us. And when he writes a different story, we often end up more than just confused. Our disappointment—because it is ultimately toward him—can become distrust.

Of course, the illusive garden of gold is rarely confined to missionary service. Sometimes it is the ministry we expected to have. The marriage we thought would grow. The career we believed would be meaningful. The family we hoped to build. Even the version of ourselves we expected God to produce.

The tragedy isn’t that these desires are wrong. It’s that they become too small.

Jesus never promised to give us the life we would have chosen for ourselves. He promised something better: himself. That is why he could say, “Whoever loses their life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:25). The life we discover in Jesus is not the one we secure by clinging to our expectations, but the one we learn to receive with open hands.

Looking back, I don’t regret the garden of gold I imagined. It led me to the better garden God had already prepared.

The flowers were never the disappointment. My expectations were.

Jesus was the treasure all along.2

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Imagine spending several days squeezed onto the bench seat of an old pickup truck. On one side sits a cheerleader in uniform. On the other, a curmudgeon in overalls. Between them is you—a bewildered traveler trying to make sense of the world.

The cheerleader sees possibility everywhere. The road ahead is full of adventure and stories yet to be written. Her idealism is impossible to hide.

The curmudgeon has seen too much to be impressed. He knows how often plans unravel, how ideals can outrun reality. He has scars beneath his cynicism.

For mile after mile, they argue between blocks of tense silence.

One insists that the world is brighter than we think.
The other that it is harder than we imagine.

And somewhere between them, you are left wondering which one is telling the truth.

When I think about encouraging people toward missional zeal, I often think about that pickup truck. Part of me wants to be the cheerleader. God’s mission is beautiful. The invitation to join him is worth giving our lives to. Your gain will be a hundredfold (Mark 10:30).

And yet another part of me wants to be the curmudgeon. The obedient Christian life can be lonely, disorienting, and painful. The cost is real. It may, at some point, break your heart and possibly your body. Possibly even your faith.

Over the years, I have found myself listening to both voices, and sometimes being their mouthpiece. Living between them has drawn me to an important question: which does mobilization require more—excitement or sobriety?

Becoming Disillusioned

My desire to hold these competing instincts together comes from experience.

Growing up in a rural small town, I needed someone to awaken me to God’s heart for the nations. When that awakening finally came, it came through conferences, guest speakers, and college ministries. During my junior year, the Traveling Team visited my campus, and for the first time I felt a deep longing to spend my life serving among other cultures.

In many ways, I needed the cheerleader.

I needed someone to tell me that following Jesus could be more global and more adventurous than I had imagined. I needed someone to challenge my assumptions and call me toward obedience. The hype worked.

What no one prepared me for was how difficult obedience could become.

Only eighteen months after moving overseas, I experienced a mental and physical breakdown. Part of the pain was the breakdown itself. Another part was my surprise that it had happened at all.

I knew missionary life would involve sacrifice. I did not expect my ongoing sinfulness. I did not expect seasons of boredom. I did not expect the frustration of team conflict. I did not expect how easily idealism could erode beneath the weight of daily life in a hard place.

Looking back, I wish I had listened more openly to those who gave warnings. Not to discourage me from going, but to help me normalize the troubles when they arrived.

Years later, when I became a missions pastor, stepping into the role of the cheerleader felt natural. God’s mission is exciting. Inviting people into it is exciting. I gladly waved the pom-poms.

But then I watched people go.
And I watched them suffer.

Some thrived. Some struggled. Some came home carrying wounds deeper than anyone expected.

One family I had walked with closely endured unhealthy leadership, a violent mugging, and eventually the loss of a child. As I watched them endure and ultimately come home, I began to revisit my own story. I found myself wondering whether I had spoken too much about the beauty of mission without speaking honestly enough about its cost.

Slowly, almost without noticing, I laid down my pom-poms and picked up a cane. The curmudgeon had arrived.

Becoming Wise

I am not sure faithfulness asks us to choose between excitement and sobriety.

When I am only a cheerleader, the curmudgeon grumbles. When I am only a curmudgeon, the cheerleader protests. Each voice seems to know something the other forgets.

The cheerleader remembers that God’s mission is thrilling.
The curmudgeon remembers that obedience can hurt.

For a season, I treated these voices as enemies. But slowly, I have come to believe they are not meant to rage against each other. They are meant to be gathered and redeemed into something wiser.

Maybe the better word is “sage.”

A sage is not merely someone with experience. Plenty of experienced people become cynical. A sage is someone who has learned to see reality more truthfully, without turning away from either its beauty or its sorrow.

Zack Eswine describes the work of a sage as learning to look over reality without closing his eyes to its madness and folly.1 That kind of wisdom does not flatten the world into simple categories. It does not pretend suffering is less painful than it is. It also does not allow suffering to have the final word.

This is why Scripture gives us wisdom literature. Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job do not speak from only one angle. They teach us to live in a world where diligence matters and outcomes still confound us, where joy is a gift and grief is honest, where God is good and life under the sun is meaningless.

Wisdom has a way of taking truths that seem opposed and teaching us how to hold them together.

God’s mission is lovely.
God’s mission is costly.
Both are true.

And at the center of Christian wisdom stands Christ himself. Paul calls him “the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24). In him, all the hidden treasures of wisdom (Colossians 2:3) are not merely explained but embodied.

The gospel is the clearest revelation of this wisdom. Jesus’ crucifixion was the worst thing that ever happened and the best thing that ever happened—at the same time. Human sin did its darkest work. Divine love accomplished its deepest grace.

Only the wisdom of God can teach us to see both.

So perhaps the question is not whether faithfulness requires more excitement or more sobriety. Perhaps faithfulness requires wisdom: the wisdom to speak of gain without naivety, and loss without despair.

I may still live between the cheerleader and the curmudgeon. But Christ, the Wisdom of God, lives in me.

Telling the Whole Story

If wisdom means learning to hold joy and sorrow together, then perhaps the most important quality in missional mobilization is honesty.

Not pessimism. Not optimism. Honesty.

The kind of honesty that refuses to hide the cost of obedience while also refusing to hide its reward.

Years ago, when I first learned to write and deliver liturgy, we were taught to speak with “strength and joy.” The words themselves needed to be honest about the brokenness of the world. But they also needed to point people toward the unshakable reality of God. I have never forgotten that.

The image that comes to mind is not a missions conference but a gathering of veterans. In a podcast series marking the twentieth anniversary of the film miniseries Band of Brothers, the actors repeatedly described their encounters with the World War II veterans they were portraying.2 The most memorable moments came when the veterans gathered together and simply told their stories.

They laughed. They cried. They remembered victories and failures.

The young actors sat captivated. Idealism was being replaced by something deeper. Not cynicism.

Wisdom.

I have witnessed similar moments whenever Christians who have walked in long obedience tell the truth about their lives. Not polished testimonies or recruiting speeches. But also not just horror stories. Rather, a multi-layered glimpse into the real person.

I remember one missionary recounting how his daughter nearly died because medical care was hours away. As he told the story, years later, the pain was still visible. Then he looked around the room and asked: “Are you ready to lose a child over this?”

The room fell silent. You could almost hear idealism hitting the floor.

And yet no one wanted to leave. That is what fascinates me.

The story did not make God’s mission less compelling. It made it more believable.

It is the same honesty we hear in Jesus during the final hours before his crucifixion. In John 13–17, he speaks of glory, joy, friendship, and the kingdom to come. But he is also painfully honest about suffering, betrayal, scattering, and death.

He tells the whole story. And somehow that honesty makes his invitation more compelling, not less—at least to those with ears to hear.

That is the posture I want in the way I speak about mission. I want to tell the whole story.

The beauty and the cost.
The victories and the disappointments.
The laughter and the tears.

The moments when God’s presence felt undeniable and the moments when faith was fragile. I want to speak with strength and joy; with honesty.

I want to stay in the old pickup truck.

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In 2009, alpinists Fabrizio Zangrilli, Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, and Simone Leorin stood at the base camp of K2, the world’s second tallest mountain, and watched a friend fall to his death. They then helped load the man onto an emergency helicopter while consoling his climbing partner.

That climbing partner, remarkably, would return to K2 the following year and himself die on the mountain.

Perhaps even more bewildering, however, is that the trio not only continued their summit attempt, but returned to the foreboding mountain again and again in the years that followed.

Why?

Why do human beings pursue things that seem to stretch beyond our mortality? Why are we drawn toward tasks that seem impossibly large?

Somewhere deep within us is the desire to belong to something bigger than ourselves. It is so woven into our humanity that we often fail to notice it beneath the ordinary rhythms of life. Yes, a climber climbs because he loves to climb. But as Zangrilli observed, “The will to try something big, something dangerous, something extraordinary, it’s part of who we are.”1

The Source

Thanks to Scripture, we know these longings are not accidental. Genesis 1:27 tells us we were created “in the image of God.” Every person who has ever existed, therefore, is bound up with something big, dangerous, and extraordinary: God himself.

It makes sense, then, that God gave such a staggering calling to his image-bearers: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). It was a mandate so great that it’s almost absurd: one primitive couple in a Mesopotamian garden told to cover and rule five quadrillion square feet of wild earth.

The scope is divine.

Yet with the arrival of sin, humanity forgot the purpose and posture of this calling. They would need a command that reoriented them to the source of their longing: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37–40).

With the arrival of Jesus Christ, however, humanity would finally see how this calling and command could be fulfilled. Through his death and resurrection, Jesus made it possible for his followers not merely to remember God’s mandate, but to participate in it. Thus, he issued a commission: to go in his authority and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:18–20).

What would it look like for the world to be filled and subdued by people who love God with all their heart and love their neighbors as themselves?

It looks like ordinary men and women joining Jesus in his impossibly large work of making disciples in all of life, among all places, at all times.

The Greatest “Bigger”

In light of these truths, I’m convinced the greatest “bigger something”—that which we all long for—is found in Jesus and his beautiful, dangerous, extraordinary mission.

For a small percentage of Christians, this longing draws them across geographic boundaries into cross-cultural ministry. Like a mountaineer captivated by the summit, they step into unfamiliar places because they can’t not. As Simone Leorin once said of K2, “We come here because this is where we feel most truly alive.”2

But this participation was never something intended to be experienced only by an elite group of image-bearers. Arrival at its base camp actually requires no passport.

In God’s upside-down kingdom, it is not always the grandeur of the mission that leaves us with the deepest sense of fulfillment. Often, our longing to join in something great becomes inseparably tied to the painful realization of just how small we really are.

When I arrived in Africa as a young missionary, despite years of anticipation, I almost turned around and headed straight back home. Joining a small team serving among eight million of some of the most isolated people in the world sounded compelling in a college dorm room. But driving along mountain ranges and seeing glittering tin roofs scattered across incomprehensible landscapes, the magnitude of it all became overwhelming. The pulsing guitar riffs of Passion conferences no longer had the power to convince me I could go and change the world.

I was way too small.

I Surrender

Afterward, I remember muttering, half to myself and half to God, “If this depends on me, then I quit.” I couldn’t make it to all those huts. I couldn’t even speak the language. It was pure desperation. Like Bill Bryson’s description of being lost in a vast forest, I felt “small and confused and vulnerable, like a small child in a crowd of strange legs.”3

In hindsight, this surrender was more than missiological; it was deeply personal. I had placed myself at the edge of something far beyond my capacities and suddenly realized just how incapable I was for the task before me. I needed a God bigger than the mountain.

Wherever you land in Scripture, it is hard to miss that people are small and God is big. Yet it is often when we see ourselves as part of God’s mission that we truly begin to accept our smallness. Abiding in Christ’s commission—even on the other side of despair—helped me realize that although he invites us into his vast purposes, they do not finally depend on us. He speaks to us like Gandalf’s final words to Bilbo in The Hobbit:

“You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in the wide world after all!”

And we respond as Bilbo does, laughing:

“Thank goodness!”4

That, my friend, is a greater feat than any summiteer has ever known.

To be sure, the Christian who avails him or herself to God’s mission will find something bigger. Whether along an escarpment or in a hut, a classroom or a cubicle, a nursery or a nursing home, the wonder of joining Jesus in his work in all of life, among all places, and at all times speaks to some of the deepest longings of the human soul.

Not because you finally find your niche.

But because, here, you behold your God.5

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What are things that, if you do not tend to them, slowly fall apart?

Gardens.
Clothes.
Teeth.

Interestingly, the soul is little different. And yet the soul is often the very thing we neglect most easily.

This happens in part because the soul is difficult to see. Much of what shapes us happens beneath the surface of our lives. A vibrant soul has much to do with awareness—awareness of God, awareness of ourselves, awareness of what is forming us over time.

David describes this kind of attentiveness in Psalm 131:2:

“I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.”

It is a tender image. Attunement, born of pruning.

But many of us have been formed into the opposite kind of life. We live hurried lives in a distracted world. We learn to measure ourselves by productivity, usefulness, accomplishment, visibility. Even our spirituality can become another form of striving. And sometimes, our desire to be useful to God only deepens the estrangement.

Becoming

The Christian tradition has long used the phrase spiritual formation to describe this slow shaping of the soul.

At its simplest, spiritual formation is the process of being conformed to the image of Jesus Christ—in the inmost heart and gradually expressed in every domain of our being. The apostle Paul writes that Christians are being transformed “from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Elsewhere he says that God’s purpose is that every Christian would become “fully mature in Christ” (Colossians 1:28). Spiritual formation is not merely about gaining more knowledge or more discipline. It is about becoming—becoming a unique reflection of Jesus himself.

This transformation is not passive, nor is it instant. It involves participation. Over time, even the ordinary practices of the Christian life—prayer, Scripture, worship, confession, silence, obedience, work, recreation, suffering, death—become the means by which God reshapes us from the inside out.

A hint of this is found in a simple prayer that my wife and I pray over our daughters: “God, help these children become all you created them to be.” It reminds us that our goal is not merely happy or successful children, but setting young image-bearers on an ever-emerging pilgrimage.

I think spiritual formation is, in many ways, learning to desire that same thing for ourselves.

Not merely that God would use us. But that, over time, we would become more of who he uniquely created us to be.

Beneath the Surface

If spiritual formation is ultimately about becoming more like Jesus, then we must begin with something foundational: human beings are not disembodied spirits. We are embodied souls. Physical image-bearers.

To follow Jesus is not merely to intellectually adhere to certain truths, but to be living embodiments of those truths in a tactile world—to live in communion with the Father as we eat, drink, sleep, and walk our way to one day sharing his full resurrection life.

And yet we often reduce the Christian life to what can be seen on the surface:

believe the right things,
do the right things.

But human beings are far more complex than cognition and volition. Much of who we are exists under the surface of our lives, hidden like the mass of an iceberg beneath the waterline:

our stories,
our wounds,
our bodies,
our fears,
our desires,
our families,
our personalities,
our learned ways of relating.

As Peter Scazzero writes, “Jesus may be in your heart, but grandpa is in your bones.”1

We can choose to oversimplify the Christian life to only what’s on the surface. But Jesus didn’t die to purchase only our public lives and productivity. He paid the price to obtain even what’s beneath the waterline.

All of us.

He’s not satisfied with extracting usefulness. He aims to redeem every part of us. In other words, he doesn’t just want to get something out of you.

He wants you.

And I think this is where our understanding of mission has become too small. We frequently speak about God’s purposes only in terms of what he wants to do through us:

people converted,
churches planted,
nations reached.

These things matter deeply. But God’s mission is also about what he wants to do in us. The outward movement of mission and the inward movement of formation cannot ultimately be separated. God forms people through participation in his redemptive purposes, and he carries his redemptive purposes forward through formed people.

This is why spiritual formation is not peripheral to God’s mission. It is part of the mission itself.

The Collapse of Usefulness

When spiritual formation is pushed to the periphery, the Christian life can quietly become transactional. Without realizing it, we begin to relate to God through a subtle formula:

Maintain your spiritual life so that you can be useful.

At first glance, that may not sound dangerous. In many Christian contexts, it even sounds responsible. But over time, the spiritual life itself becomes subordinate.

Prayer becomes a means to achievement.
Rest is valued only as fuel for more work.
Relationships are measured by outcomes.

The problem is not fruitfulness itself. Scripture speaks often about fruit:

The fruit in keeping with repentance (Matthew)
The fruit of abiding in Christ the true vine (John)
The fruit of sanctification and eternal life (Romans)
The fruit of the Spirit (Galatians)
The fruit of light found in all that is good and right and true (Ephesians)
The fruit of righteousness (Philippians)
The fruit of good works (Colossians)
The fruit of lips that acknowledge his name (Hebrews)
The fruit of wisdom (James)

This panorama is much bigger than fruit measured only as missional results: the number of shares, conversions, baptisms, disciples, churches, or movements. And yet many of us have been formed inside cultures that subtly teach us to define ourselves by visible impact. Over time, it becomes possible to build an entire spiritual life around usefulness while neglecting the soul itself.

Jesus warned about this kind of distortion. He spoke of religious leaders who traveled “over land and sea to win a single convert,” yet reproduced in others the same spiritual sickness living within themselves (Matthew 23:15).

It is possible to do work in the name of God while remaining deeply disconnected from the heart of God. Perhaps we discover this only when something interrupts our usefulness. When the neglected teeth won’t chew.

For some, it was the COVID-19 pandemic. During this crisis many missionaries returned home indefinitely or remained isolated for extended periods. While no doubt disorienting, I noticed that it was common among them to experience a disproportionate sense of worthlessness.

For me, it happened after returning to the U.S. from missionary service and working at a mall food court. Beneath the surface, I was confronting a painful question:

If I could no longer do the things that once made me feel valuable to God, then who was I?

What I slowly began to realize was how much of my identity had become entangled with functionality. If mission was only about what God did through me, then losing productivity felt like losing my reason to live.

Similarly, the prophet Elijah once collapsed beneath a broom tree and asked God to let him die. His expectations had shattered. The outcomes he imagined were not unfolding the way he thought they would.

I do not think Elijah’s despair came merely from exhaustion. I think it came from the confounding realization that God would not submit himself to Elijah’s formula. When his self-prescribed usefulness collapsed—like the betrayal of any idol—his soul collapsed with it.

Anyone who follows Jesus long enough may eventually arrive beneath the same tree.

Joy Like Swords

So, what happens when spiritual formation is valued as part of the mission itself?

At first, perhaps not what we expect. Because to desire deeper conformity to Jesus—which requires missional outwardness—is also to surrender ourselves to the painful work of pruning.

In Philippians 3, after recounting his “loss of all things,” Paul describes his deepest longing this way: to know Christ, to share in his sufferings, to become like him, and to rise with him. Not merely to accomplish things for Jesus, but to belong to him so fully that even suffering and death become places of communion.

This is a lived example of applying Jesus’ words in John 15:2: “every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.” Pruning disorients us precisely because it involves the cutting away of things we have wrapped ourselves around for meaning:

ambition,
control,
self-sufficiency,
good things distorted,
good things redeemed,
even desires God himself stirred within us.

If more of Jesus is to come alive in us, then much within us must slowly surrender. Death by a thousand paper cuts.

And yet this pruning is not punishment. It is love.

This is how God forms us into people who are capable not only of doing mighty works in the name of Jesus, but of abiding in Jesus himself. This is how he frees us from using mission to justify our existence. This is how he attunes our deepest identity not to productivity, but to belovedness.

And strangely, this is where joy begins to emerge. Right in the middle of Jesus’ teaching about pruning and abiding, he says: “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”

Not after the pruning. In the midst of it.

It is his way of producing in us, as J.R.R. Tolkien put it, “joy like swords…where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.”2

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A few Easters back, my wife and I took our daughters to an Andrew Peterson concert. During one of the songs about the suffering of Christ, our oldest daughter leaned over and quietly said:

“I feel like Jesus is calling my name.”

My wife simply whispered back:

“Well…say yes.”

I think that may be the invitation at the center of God’s purposes.

To say yes to the inward and outward movements of formation.
To say yes to becoming all God created us to be.
To say yes to Jesus.

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Do you remember the Mac vs. PC commercials from the early 2000s?

Two characters stood in contrast: “Mac,” the casual and creative one, and “PC,” the suit-wearing, slightly rigid one. It was a marketable way of naming something we instinctively recognize—that there are different ways of engaging the world around us.

In recent years, conversations about the brain have helped refine this intuition. While it’s common to speak of “left-brained” and “right-brained” people, the reality is more integrated than that. Both hemispheres are constantly working together. But some have suggested that they represent different ways of “attending to the world”—one that tends to focus on analysis, logic, and problem-solving, and another that is more open to intuition, creativity, and wonder.

Over time, individuals—and even cultures—can begin to favor one way of attending over the other. Curt Thompson, drawing on this line of thought, suggests that since the Enlightenment much of Western culture has come to view the world more predominantly as a problem to be solved than beauty to be received and cultivated.1

If that’s true more broadly, it’s worth asking whether it has also shaped the way we approach missiology.

Is it possible that—without realizing it—we sometimes engage God’s mission less with the curiosity of joining him in the beautiful things he is doing, and more with the anxiety of trying to solve the world’s problems for him?

When that happens, our starting point unknowingly shifts. Mission begins to feel like a response to a problem, rather than also participation in a story.

But our story does not begin in Genesis 3.

The Blessing Before the Breaking

The prologue of the gospel is not sinful humanity but a good Creator.

God did not simply place Adam and Eve in a garden paradise to preserve it. He sent them into the world with a calling: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). From the beginning, humanity was invited into a whole-person, whole-world vision of flourishing that was meant to unfold through God’s ever-growing global family.

There is no anxiety in Genesis 1 and 2. No micromanagement. No frantic striving.

Within the responsibility to be fruitful and multiply, God gave humanity the freedom to explore, cultivate, create, and discover fruitfulness alongside him. What has been called the Great Mandate was not merely a task to accomplish, but an invitation to participate in the goodness of God’s world.

Of course, sin introduced a terminal problem to be solved. The world became fractured by rebellion, violence, and death. Yet even then, God’s response was not merely the solving of a problem, but the beginning of a restoration. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ were not only for rescue from sin, but toward the renewal of all creation itself.

That’s part of why Mark’s version of the Great Commission feels so expansive: “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation” (Mark 16:15, emphasis mine).

Paul echoes this same vision in Colossians when he describes the gospel “bearing fruit and increasing” throughout the whole world (Colossians 1:5–6). Something transactional is happening, certainly. But something beautiful is also being formed.

The gospel is not only about what God saves us from, but also what he is restoring us for. And perhaps recovering that larger story is part of what helps us learn to attend to God’s mission with wonder again.

The Beauty Already Breaking In

To see God’s mission in this way makes room for both sorrow and joy.

Yes, we are rightly troubled by a world still marked by injustice and bondage. But we are also invited into wonder. The very existence of Christians is part of a global phenomenon unfolding across centuries and cultures: God gathering a redeemed family from every nation, language, and people.

And in many ways, that story is accelerating before our eyes:

• In recent decades, more Muslims have come to faith in Christ than at any other known period in history.2

• Christianity continues to grow rapidly across Africa, now home to the largest Christian population in the world.3

• By 2050, over half of Christians worldwide are expected to live in nations once considered part of the “mission field.”4

None of this removes the reality that many still need to hear the gospel. Nor does it lessen Christ’s call to make disciples at all times and in all places. But it does remind us that mission was never intended to be driven exclusively by scarcity and urgency. Within Christian obedience, God has renewed his offer of freedom to explore, cultivate, and discover fruitfulness alongside his ever-growing global family.

Learning to Attend to the World Differently

For many of us shaped by Western culture, it’s natural for mission to be framed as a problem to be solved. But human beings are not moved exclusively by solutions. We are made to also be compelled by beauty.

Yes, the newborn is nourished in her suckling. But her eyes reveal soulful wonder when they meet her mother’s gaze.

Recovering a more whole way of attending to missiology may begin with learning to slow down enough to notice where our attention has narrowed.

Sometimes that simply means returning to creation itself.

Research increasingly suggests that encounters with nature help restore attentiveness, creativity, and cognitive integration.5 It’s striking how often Jesus withdrew into quiet places, drawing attention to sparrows, seeds, fig trees, and lilies. Perhaps part of faithful missional formation is learning to see the world again not merely as something to discard, but as something alive with the presence and activity of the Creator, eagerly awaiting redemptive rule.

It may also mean learning to delight more deeply in the global family of Christ.

It’s tempting for Christians to individualize the weight of “finishing the task” as though the future of mission depends entirely upon their generation. But the kingdom of God has always been larger than any one people, nation, or moment in time. Across the world, believers are worshiping, suffering, persevering, and bearing witness together. There is relief in remembering that we belong to a family, not merely an assignment.

And finally, perhaps this whole-brain missiology means recovering curiosity about our own fruitfulness as sent people.

Not everyone is responsible to cross cultures vocationally or permanently. Yet as recipients of a shared commission, all Christians are sent into the ordinary places of their lives as living proof of the global kingdom of God. Homes, neighborhoods, classrooms, workplaces, churches—all become places where the life of Christ can be embodied and shared.

The invitation is not simply to accomplish something for God, but to participate with him in the renewal of all things. And often, it is in those ordinary places of participation that wonder returns to the mission again.6

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Have you ever woken up in a panic on the floor with people standing over you?

I have.

It happened while I was a twenty-five-year-old missionary in East Africa. One moment I was sitting happily with friends, eating ice cream. The next, I passed out and began seizing.

From that moment, my life changed.

I was rushed to a hospital, where I spent the next week. The doctors ran what felt like every test imaginable, searching for an explanation. They found nothing.

Then a nurse from my missions organization came and sat at the foot of my bed. I’ll never forget what she said: “Bradley, there are no physical issues, but mentally and emotionally you are very unhealthy…and you need help.”

Though not at the time, today I can see that conversation as a gift.

If I could offer one piece of advice to those pursuing a life of missional obedience, it would be simple:

Don’t be like me.

The Mission I Didn’t See

I’ve now had fifteen years to make sense of what happened. A lot was going on with that young missionary. But beneath all the complexity was a simple problem: I had not embraced spiritual formation as central to God’s mission.

By spiritual formation, I mean the lifelong journey of being conformed to the image of Christ for the glory of God and the sake of others. It is more than practicing spiritual disciplines, though habits such as prayer and Bible study are essential. Spiritual formation is learning to desire what Jesus desires and becoming more fully who he created us to be.

As much as I loved Jesus, spiritual formation was not my deepest desire.

Instead, I was driven by an incomplete understanding of mission. I thought almost exclusively about what God wanted to do through me to bring the nations into obedience to Christ. What I failed to see was that mission is also about what God wants to do in me.

I had crossed an ocean because I believed God was transforming people. What I did not yet understand was that I was one of those people.

The Soul Beneath the Surface

The first step toward embracing this vision of mission is learning to see yourself as more than a mind carrying a set of beliefs or a body accomplishing a task. Rather, you are an embodied soul.

Created in the image of God, you are profoundly complex. Much of your life is visible above the surface—your decisions, habits, strengths, and actions. But beneath the surface lies a deeper world of desires, motives, fears, wounds, and longings.

Mission has a way of activating all of it.

The challenge is that a missional life often rewards activity. There are languages to learn, relationships to build, and needs to meet. In that environment, slowing down to pay attention to your soul can feel unnecessary, even wasteful.

Yet Jesus did not come merely to redeem the visible parts of our lives. He came to redeem the whole person.

The wounds beneath the surface.
The desires we barely understand.
The places where fear, grief, and longing silently shape us.

He intends to redeem all of it.

Learning to Slow Down

One of the first lessons of spiritual formation is surprisingly simple: slow down.

Writers such as Dallas Willard, Alan Fadling, and John Mark Comer have all emphasized this truth in different ways. Yet for many aspiring to zealous obedience, it can feel almost impossible.

Can you happily be still?

Silence and solitude are not luxuries for the Christian life. They are among the ordinary ways God cares for our souls.

What often surprises us is what emerges when we finally slow down. As the noise subsides, we begin to notice what has been hidden beneath the surface. Sometimes it appears emotionally—a persistent frustration, sadness, or anxiety. Sometimes it appears physically—a heaviness in the chest, tension in the shoulders, or a lingering sense of exhaustion.

Rather than dismissing these things as distractions or signs of spiritual weakness, we can receive them as invitations. Remember, you are an embodied soul.

What surfaces in stillness is often revealing the places where God desires to bring healing, freedom, and deeper communion with himself.

Recognizing Weakness and Receiving Help

Physical and emotional health are not separate from spiritual health. They are bound together because we are whole persons before God.

When I was released from the hospital, I spent the next month in intensive counseling before returning to my place of service. It was there that I began to understand what had been happening. I had carried depression and anxiety for years, reaching back into experiences of trauma.

It was not only the trials of missionary life that had overwhelmed my body. It was a suffering soul, long neglected beneath the surface.

Your story may not include the same wounds. But in a fallen world, where we literally enter it bruised and crying, all of us carry suffering in some form. And everyone who passionately serves Christ will experience loss, limitation, and grief. Wise preparation, then, involves more than doctrine and skill. It involves learning to bring compassion and attention to our weakness.

This is one reason I often encourage emerging leaders—especially those aspiring to missionary service or church ministry—to find a Christian counselor before crisis requires it.

Counseling is not a sign that you are unfit for the work. It may be one of the ways God prepares you for it—and keeps you in it. At the very least, it can help you establish a relationship with someone wise and trustworthy, someone you can turn to when you need support.

More Than Service

There is much more that could be said.

Practice sabbath.
Eat, sleep, and exercise well.
Make room for friendship.
Learn to lament.

But the larger invitation remains: do not be like me.

Do not wait until your body breaks before you begin listening to your soul. Do not cheapen the value of the work he is doing in you.

For years, I thought mission was primarily about what God wanted to do through me. I now see that my spiritual formation was never secondary.

Christ is not in a love relationship with your service. He loves you.

And because he loves you, you are free to embrace the mission beneath the mission.1

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O Christ, you have used life’s grit to form pearls
in the deep and secret waters of my soul.
Guide me now as I dive to find them.

—A Liturgy Before Writing a Poem1

One of my earliest memories is the sound of an electric typewriter. My grandmother, whose funeral I will preach today, was the one who bought it for me. It sat in my room, overlooking the rolling farmland of Oil Valley. And somewhere in the thwack of each key, writing became my homeland.

As the hues of the fields changed with each Kentucky season, so my typewriter produced crops of various yield. Little has changed today, save the now-silent keys. Give me a task and see if I will not make it a prompt. Give me a life and see if I will not make sense of it with paper and ink.

I am a writer.

In the past 18 months I have published almost nothing. This was intentional. The ground needed to rest.

In 2023 I experienced severe burnout from pastoral ministry. Last year I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and channeled my energy into the recovery process. While I have written more in the past two years than at any other time in my life, the volumes have been unto God alone.

Now, it is time for the plow again. As Annie Dillard says, “When you write you lay out a line of words…and it digs a path you follow.”2 I long to remember how the Maker cuts the furrow, how he brings new beginnings from old scars.

Writing means returning, but not in the same way. The form of the work must change too. Beautiful Missiology is no longer simply a portfolio to store writing. I hope it becomes a place where readers gather to reflect together.

Yes, I want green fields again, but at the heart of God’s mission is a shared harvest among friends. If this vision resonates with you, I’d be grateful if you stayed. I suspect that’s how Beautiful Missiology will become all that it was meant to be.

So please read along. Reflect with me. Join the conversation.

Let’s see what grows.

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