After a quarter of framing the new season of Beautiful Missiology, it seems fitting to end not with another essay but with a prayer. This is for those who have labored in God’s mission long enough to feel well-worn—and who need again to receive the grace they so often hold out to others. It can be used as inspiration for an individual prayer, or offered as a liturgy in a group by everyone repeating the italicized lines together.

O God who envisioned a world to fill with glory
And then made it by your word
You have seen a new creation to fill with glory
Poured in by Christ the living Word
Topped off by the redeemed of every nation

Lord, I long to see that world.

Yet you have not spoken it into being
No, you have chosen instead
To speak your word through unclean lips
To pour your glory through cracked jars
To win it all through the weak and needy

Lord, I am often weak and needy.

I know you will see your vision through
I know it, or I wouldn’t be here still
But I have been around the block enough to know
This is a vision so big
That only you could accomplish it

Lord, I believe—help my unbelief.

I labor in a ministry that demands immediate results
But it’s slow work
I live with a burden to see the lost saved
But I cannot save
I feel an urgency to mobilize your church
But we are so easily distracted
I carry a longing to be sent out myself
But here I am
I love to befriend those who are going
But they leave me
I continue to pour myself into this work
But I grow tired

Lord, I am not sufficient for these things.

So I look to you who bids me come
Again and again and again
Whose only requirement for grace
Is to come weak and needy
Empty to be filled

Lord, I need the same gospel I hold out to others.

You invite me to rest and wear your yoke
The tool for working oxen
I confess it is a strange analogy
And yet it is an easy and light burden
When I see that you do the heavy lifting

Lord, your finished work secures that which is unfinished.

O God who saw in me a vessel to fill with glory
Here again I offer back that which you have first given
My strength, my weakness, my everything
Pour through me Christ the living Word
And top off your world with the redeemed from every nation.

Amen.1

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Yared was walking home.1 It had been a few months since he decided to follow Jesus and he wanted to share the good news with his family in the East African countryside. Along the way, two men approached him. One drew him into friendly conversation; the other struck him without warning in the stomach, knocking him unconscious.

When he awoke, his hands were bound and his shirt had been taken. The men humiliated him for his Christian faith. Crowning a host of cruel acts, they spit on him. Yared did not retaliate. Eventually, he broke free and ran away.

There are many ways to despise a living person. But spitting in someone’s face gives contempt a physical form. It says, You are not worthy of human regard. You are dead to me.

Hopefully few of us have ever been literally spat upon. But we all likely know something of the message it carries. Perhaps we have seen contempt gather in another person’s eyes or sharpen their voice. We have felt it in words behind our back or a finger raised in our face.

And maybe we also know the answering temptation: to return contempt for contempt.

The Face He Would Not Hide

On the way to the cross, Jesus told his disciples exactly what awaited him:

See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. And after flogging him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise. Luke 18:31–33

Luke tells us that the disciples understood none of this. Jesus, however, knew full well how his body would be violated on Good Friday—even down to the detail of being spit upon.

How did he know? Was it his familiarity with the ways of sinful humanity? Was it his divine knowledge of all things? Perhaps it was simpler than that. Jesus was a man of the Scriptures. And knowing them well, he would have carried near to heart the words of Isaiah 50:

Morning by morning he awakens;
he awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught.
The Lord God has opened my ear,
and I was not rebellious;
I turned not backward.
I gave my back to those who strike,
and my cheeks to those who pull out the beard;
I hid not my face
from disgrace and spitting.
But the Lord God helps me;
therefore I have not been disgraced;
therefore I have set my face like a flint.
Isaiah 50:4–7

I find the order compelling. Before the servant sets his face, God opens his ear. He listens, he does not turn backward, and because the Lord helps him, he does not hide his face. His resilience is not grim self-reliance. It grows from communion with God.

As Jesus continued toward Jerusalem, Isaiah’s words were fulfilled with grave precision. Those gathered in the hall of the high priest spat in his face. Later, Roman soldiers spat upon him too. Matthew records the moment with brutal simplicity: “‘He deserves death,’ they answered. Then they spit in his face” (26:66-67).

Why did the Gospel writers preserve this terrible detail?

The Depth of Our Contempt

If Jesus Christ is God in the flesh, then to spit in his face is part of human sin in its most concentrated form. It is the creature’s contempt for the Creator made visible. Charles Spurgeon grieved it this way:

Why couldst thou not spit upon earthly splendors? Why must heaven be thy scorn? Or if heaven, why not spit on angels! Was there no place for thy spittle but His face? His face! Woe is me! His face! Should such loveliness receive such shame as this? I could wish that man had never been created, or that being created, he had been swept into nothingness rather than have lived to commit such horror.2

It is tempting to distance ourselves from the people who did it. I was not there. I would never have done such a thing. But Spurgeon makes it difficult to remain a spectator. He traces this contempt not firstly to the beginning of the passion, but all the way back to Eden. “When our parents broke the command of their Maker…they did as it were spit into the face of God.” Every sin since, he writes, has been “a repetition of the same contempt of the Eternal One.”3

It may not be common today to spit into the face of someone we despise. But that doesn’t mean contempt is absent. Our practices of it just usually appear more respectable. It abides in the dismissive look, the refusal to listen, the decisive online comments—anything that reduces another person to whatever we oppose in them. These acts are not equivalent to the violence Christ suffered or my friend Yared endured. Yet they grow from the same impulse to place another person beneath our regard.

While pastoring through 2020, I felt this temptation from both directions. No one spat in my face; neither did I in theirs. But I did have fingers publicly waved in it, along with other moments when I was reviled. Again and again, I had to choose whether to revile in turn or hold my face steady without allowing my heart to harden. Or break.

Contempt wants to reproduce itself. It urges me to become what has wounded me.

The terrible detail preserved in the Gospels therefore exposes more than what those men did to Jesus. It reveals something that dwells within.

The Height of His Grace

Spurgeon sees this exposure flowing into something much grander:

Now, of all the things that ever existed, sin is the most shameful thing that can be. It deserves to be scourged, it deserves to be spit upon, it deserves to be crucified…If you want to see what God thinks of sin, see His only Son spat upon when He was made sin for us.4

At the cross, Jesus bore the judgment our sin deserved. But the cross gives us more than a doctrine to explain. It gives us a face to behold.

The full wonder of grace is not only that such degradation happened. Spitting in another person’s face was evil no matter who received it. The wonder is that the sinless Son of God willingly entered the violence and shame our sin created—and he remained.

To spit repeatedly in someone’s face, that face must remain exposed. The human impulse is to duck and cover, to immediately begin restoring your honor by at least wiping the dribble from your cheek. Isaiah says that Jesus did not hide his.

This was not helpless resignation. He knew what awaited him and did not turn backward. His face remained steady because his ear remained open to the Father. The truth spoken over him kept the disgrace from defining him. Therefore he did not retaliate. The contempt did not harden his heart. Nor break it beyond repair.

Spurgeon marvels at the contrast:

He who covers the heavens with blackness, yet did not cover His own face, and He who binds up the universe with the girdle which holds it in one, yet was bound and blindfolded by the men He had Himself made; He whose face is as the brightness of the sun that shineth in its strength was once spit upon.5

Why this, Lord?

Because you loved us. Yes, you poured out your life so that our sins could be forgiven. But also so that our contempt for you could be transformed into affection. And the shame we carry stripped of its power. And the retaliation we wield beaten into plowshares.

Stay Close to Me

On the night before his face was spat upon, Jesus told his disciples, “Abide in me” (John 15:4). In the same conversation, he warned them, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you” (John 15:18). Communion and contempt belonged to the same conversation.

In The Chosen’s depiction of that night, Jesus says something to the apostle John that lingers with me. John admits, “Things are going to change.” Jesus replies, “Yes, John, but stay close to me.”6

The lines are imagined, but I think they capture the heart of Jesus’ invitation. Things were about to change indeed. The disciples would be scattered into hiding. Their hope would not be found in holding themselves together. Resilience would only be possible by a restored closeness to him.

Abiding does not always mean remaining wherever someone harms us. Yared broke his bonds and ran. It means remaining with Jesus wherever obedience carries us. We keep receiving his love so that contempt does not determine what we become—or what we return.

Perhaps this is how we hold our faces steady even when our hearts are breaking. Not by becoming invulnerable, but by staying close to the One who did not hide his.

Lord, we lift our faces to you.

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It was the leaves that told me I was 7,370 miles from home. I had been a missionary in East Africa for a year—long enough to mark the end of the honeymoon phase. As a rare breeze rustled something brittle in the compound’s concrete yard, my love for Kentucky’s distinct seasons, especially Fall, immediately stirred deep memory. And I felt hope fade from me like leaves approaching their colorful death.

I was homesick.

That was when I met Wendell Berry. Not in person, of course. Like most of us, I shook his hand in the form of a book. The introduction came by way of an older agricultural missionary who had also recently taught me how to garden. I suppose a patch of land is the best place to meet the late Kentucky author. Even if it is surrounded by concrete.

The book was A Place on Earth, one of Berry’s novels set in the fictional town of Port William. The dialect immediately transported me back to the tobacco farm where I grew up. That alone could’ve shaken my fragile emotions into a bare winter. But I soon realized the story was communicating something deeper than Kentucky lore.

A Theology of Place

Uprooting and moving across the world has a way of severing you from a sense of place. Familiar soil and shared identity help keep your feet on the ground. As a missionary, I had given up both. I boarded the airplane and never really came back down.

What Berry restored to me was what I call “a theology of place.” Not necessarily binding me to a Port William of my own, never to leave. Rather, it unveiled the sacredness of the ground beneath my feet—whatever obscure stretch of earth God had given me to inhabit for a time. I found it quieting my urge to always be somewhere else, offended by the ordinariness of where I already was.

God made this place. There is a story here. I am alive in it. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

The Heaven I Had Imagined

Nurturing the rows of carrots and watching my little patch grow, I was comforted. Yet I began to sense a tension between Berry’s love for the earth and what I had learned about Christian faith and missionary vocation. The more I cared about the soil, the more something told me I shouldn’t. My citizenship is in heaven, I said to myself. This is all just going to burn up someday.

I’m on a mission to save souls, not trees.

Yet the more I learned to see the trees, and to love them, the more a tree-less heaven lost its appeal.

Fill it with the redeemed from every nation, tribe, people and language? Yes! Center it on knowing Jesus face to face alongside his bride? Please! But spend eternity floating on clouds, attending endless worship services, and pacing alone in the halls of my mansion? If I was honest, I was beginning to prefer a garden, or Kentucky in Fall.

To my surprise, one of Berry’s characters in A Place on Earth confessed the same thing:

“I ain’t saying I don’t believe there’s a Heaven. I surely hope there is…But I do say it ain’t easy to believe. And even while I hope for it, I’ve got to admit I’d rather go to Port William.”1

I believed in the life to come. But in my homesickness I was beginning to wonder whether the life I pictured there was the one God had actually promised.

Learning to Imagine Redemption

Now fearful of Berry’s influence, I turned to the Scriptures to prove him wrong. They provided a revealing look indeed.

“Our citizenship is in heaven,” Paul writes. But he immediately describes the Savior we await from there, “who will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:20–21). The heavenly citizenship I had invoked actually came with a profoundly physical hope.

Elsewhere, I found Paul extending that hope to creation itself. Alongside our bodies awaiting redemption, the world God made groans to be “liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:19–22). I couldn’t help but acknowledge the continuity. Even as the transformed creation exceeds what we have experienced in a fallen world, it does not become an alien world.

I dove deeper. Scripture didn’t deny a fearsome judgement in which “the heavens will be dissolved with fire and the elements will melt with heat.” Yet Peter’s burning description still leads toward the promise of “new heavens and a new earth where righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:10–13). The fire I found was also a refining fire.

Then the Bible’s final vision gave my imagination something to really work with. In Revelation 21-22 an earthy redemption emerges, with the promise that “all things” are being made new. A city descends from heaven. God makes his dwelling with his people. A river flows from his throne. The tree of life bears fruit. The nations bring their glory into the city. God’s servants worship him and see his face.

There were leaves in the story after all.

Hope Taking Root

Even in that concrete yard, suddenly the leaves gave my hope a place on earth. The goodness that had drawn me into cross-cultural mission had also led me to a garden. I was sowing gospel words and planting carrots and cucumbers. Both could be acts of homesick faith.

This is what I have come to call redemptive imagination: the intentional practice of letting God’s promises shape our vision of the future, deepen our desire for the world he will make new, and strengthen our hope within the one we inhabit now. Unlike the cloudy eschatology of my childhood, it hinges on continuity between this creation and the new creation, a connection that I believe Scripture validates.

There will be trees.

I could not say how much that world would resemble my little garden, or the Kentucky farm where I grew up. But that wasn’t a reason to avoid imagining it. Don’t become so heavenly minded that you’re no earthly good, warned my conscience. Yet as my imagination reached toward the new creation, my feet actually started coming back down to the ground. This is a place worth loving.

In a short time, my longing had grown beyond simply a return to the place I had left. I could groan for the redemption of the ground where I now stood, and for its people to know the Christ who had come to save them. I could proclaim that hope, even as I sowed in dirt and tears.

The world God’s mission is moving toward was beginning to change how I received the life he had given me. The risen Christ who sends his people also gives them a material future. Remembering that future could help me remain present when the work was slow, the place unfamiliar, and home still 7,370 miles away.

Toward Home

I’m grateful for the surprising influence of a Kentucky author and a farming missionary. In line and furrow, they helped me read Scripture better. In hope, they enlarged my hope.

I still love Kentucky in Fall. I know the home I await is far greater, with room for the redeemed of every nation. Its deepest joy will be God with us. Yet somehow it will never despise a creation bearing witness.

Whether surrounded by colors or concrete, I now find myself lingering over a part of that preternatural witness: a tree. It is said to have leaves that are “for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2⁠).

That is a future I was born to imagine.

And while I wait, there is a place to love beneath my feet.

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This morning as I write, my family is still asleep. In a little while I will leave to pick up donuts for a breakfast celebration marking the beginning of another homeschool year.

Afterward, I will drive to the office and carry on the work of Upstream Collective. Next month I will fly to Kenya to do some of the same things there. Significant parts of my vocation will be public: preaching, equipping, writing, influencing. People will recognize it as ministry. They may even call it missions.

Meanwhile, almost everything my wife does today will remain hidden. Katie will feed our four daughters, pray with them, teach them, correct them, listen to them, and begin again when the day does not go according to plan. There will be no microphone, passport stamp, or published report. Her work will carry joys, frustrations, privileges, and sometimes questions about whether any of it is making a difference.

The missions language I inherited knows exactly how to describe my trip to Kenya. It is less equipped to show how Katie’s daily vocation belongs to the formation and witness of a sent people.

To me, that seems like a problem.

The Sending We Did Not Expect

Katie and I once expected that God would send our family to East Africa. Homeschooling was part of that imagined future: something we would likely need to do while living in a remote place. Instead, God kept us in the United States, serving local churches and helping them send their members. But Katie’s desire to invest deeply in our children remained.1

So she laid aside other vocational possibilities—not because she lacked education, giftedness, or desire, but because she believed this was what God was giving her to receive in this season. In turn, it has become a place where she gives herself in love.

I have elsewhere described parents as archers who prepare their children to be sent into the world.2 I still believe that. Katie is helping our daughters love learning, find Jesus in the pages, and (hopefully) follow the curiosities he stirs into lives shaped by his purposes.

But even that can miss something important. Katie’s work does not matter only because of what our children may someday become. She is not merely raising sent ones. She is herself sent.

Her labor would matter even if none of our daughters ever crossed an ocean. It is not significant because it frees me to do the “real ministry.” If (and when) seasons change and God gives her other things to attend to—working outside our home, pursuing another degree, caring for a parent, recovering from illness—it will not mean a higher or lesser calling. Her work matters because she is a beloved image-bearer receiving a particular gift from God and offering it back in love for the good of others.

This is what I mean by sent identity.

Loved Before Sent

In the previous essay, I traced the movement of sending and receiving across Scripture. The Father sends the Son. The Father and Son send the Spirit. The Triune God sends his sons and daughters. Those who receive God’s grace are caught up in its movement toward others.

But the order matters.

When the risen Jesus enters the locked room in John 20, the disciples are not presented as courageous witnesses ready for deployment. They are frightened people hiding behind a door. Before Jesus gives them a responsibility, he gives them his presence. He speaks peace. He shows them the wounds through which that peace was secured. He breathes the Holy Spirit upon them. Only within this abundance of giving and receiving do they hear, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (John 20:21).

Their sending is not a demand placed upon their own reserves. It is their participation in a life they have received from Jesus.

This corrects something in the way I learned to relate to missiology. The productivity-driven imagination of Western culture indeed helped fuel the modern missions movement. I am grateful for that. Yet I also recognize that it likely taught us to begin with activity: take this trip, join this project, meet this need, reach these people, finish the task.

The goals may be virtuous. The problem is not the activity, but the order. Without cultural awareness, the underlying logic can become instrumentalist—valuing things as means to an end rather than as having intrinsic worth. People are measured for what they accomplish and faithfulness is ascribed by numeric results. But this cultural driver already has people exhaustingly busy. Missions is just one more urgent demand honking for attention.

Sent identity begins elsewhere. It allows our identity—what God has done for us—to inform our activity, rather than allowing our activity—what we have done for God—to determine our identity. Christians do not become sent by making ourselves useful. Through the gospel we discover that, as Gentiles now grafted into Christ’s body, we already belong to the sending God. We are living testimonies of a global mission—long before we take an evangelism class or go on our first mission trip.

Sent into Ordinary Life

I don’t believe this means that every Christian should be called a missionary. The particular work of crossing languages and cultures to proclaim the gospel, make disciples, and establish churches among all nations remains essential. It often requires specialization, preparation, and sacrifice, and its uniqueness should be protected.3

But every Christian belongs to a sent people.

Some are sent across oceans. All are sent into the world God loves. The Father sent the Son not away from the world but into it. Jesus now sends his people in the same direction—not necessarily out of ordinary life, but into it.

This does not mean applying a religious label to everything we already do. Nor does it make every ordinary task an act of evangelism. The gospel still must be spoken. People must hear the name of Jesus, be warned of sin and judgment, understand his death and resurrection, and be invited to follow him. Recognizing who we already are—witnesses (Acts 1:8), ambassadors (2 Corinthians 5:20), shining lights (Matthew 5:14; Philippians 2:15)—does not replace proclamation.

Sent identity simply refuses to divide life into the parts God can use and the parts that do not matter. It means receiving our whole lives—our relationships, neighborhoods, work, limitations, gifts, tables, and daily responsibilities—as places where we may bear witness to the beauty, goodness, and truth of God.

Our lives can embody and commend the gospel through hospitality, reconciliation, thoughtful work, patient presence, and making something good. But these practices cannot name Jesus by themselves. Christian witness reaches its proper clarity when embodied love and spoken testimony belong together. In many cases, sentness is less about adding a new category of activity than learning to inhabit the life we have received with Christlike love and purpose.

Missiology may uproot some of us. But first, it grounds all of us.

Cultivating Beauty

Sent identity rests upon a human vocation older than the church’s missionary efforts. Before humanity was called to carry good news through a broken world, image-bearers received a good world to inhabit and fill to God’s glory. The creation mandate is not the Great Commission. But redemption does not discard our created vocation; in Christ, it begins to renew and redirect it.

I sometimes refer to this as cultivating beauty. Curt Thompson connects it to our identity as image-bearers. To exercise dominion is to steward the world in ways that allow creation and its inhabitants to flourish. That beauty may take the form of a garden, friendship, meal, business plan, marriage, or work of art. Human beings were made to create beauty “in the presence of and for others.”4

Beauty, then, is not merely prettiness. It is not polish, ease, or public admiration. Beauty is something like the goodness and truth of God taking form in and through his creation and image-bearers.

Sometimes that cultivation happens amid ruins. Thompson tells the story of Vedran Smailović playing his cello in the wreckage of Sarajevo after a mortar attack. His music did not end the siege. It did, however, turn people’s attention away from the inevitability of violence and toward another way of being human. Beauty did not deny the brokenness. It answered it with a sign of life.5

The gospel itself is the supreme picture of this. The Son of God on a cross is the ugliest form our world has ever known. And yet from it flows God’s highest good. It is that very juxtaposition that heightens the beauty of Jesus’ self-giving love.

Much of the beauty cultivated in the ordinary lives we have received is similar. It does not arrive after frustration and exhaustion have been removed. It grows among them. It may look like remaining present when leaving would be easier, or leaving when remaining present would disrupt flourishing beyond repair. It may look like creating order that will soon become chaos again—the toys, dishes, and crayons in my own household are a daily testimony of this.

Yet this is not how Western culture usually measures significance. We notice what is visible, scalable, efficient, and profitable. The Christian faith is not immune from those values. Sermons can be downloaded. Mission trips can be photographed. Books can be counted among copies sold. Beauty becomes a commodity.6

The irony is, measuring our work only by profitability often just ends up cheapening it.

The Hiddenness God Sees

Thankfully, God does not measure significance the way we do.

Scripture is filled with the quiet assurance that what escapes human attention does not escape his. In Psalm 139, David marvels that God saw him fully while he was being “fearfully and wonderfully made…in the secret place” (vv. 14–15). Even the darkness is not dark to God. He knows the depths within us that we cannot perceive ourselves.

Jesus describes his Father as the one “who sees in secret” (Matthew 6:4). Our giving and praying do not require an audience to acquire significance. Their worth does not depend upon being noticed, admired, measured, or reported.

The Father already sees. And he does not seem to find this hidden life a bore.

The Son of God himself spent most of his earthly life in the obscurity of Nazareth. Scripture records almost none of those years. We know only that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, lived in submission to his parents, and labored as a carpenter. Yet long before Jesus preached a sermon or performed a miracle, the Father called him his beloved Son (Matthew 3:17).

The Father’s delight did not wait for visibility.

This gives me a better way to understand Katie’s work. Almost nothing she does can be scaled. Its fruit will emerge slowly, often beyond our ability to measure. But none of it escapes the attention of her Father.

Her faithfulness does not need to become public before it becomes precious. “God is not unjust,” Hebrews says, “so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name” (Hebrews 6:10).

One day, the stories we tell about significance will be corrected. Some achievements that appeared impressive will be exposed as empty. Some acts that gained almost no attention will receive God’s hearty approval. The Lord “will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart,” Paul writes. “Then each one will receive his commendation from God” (1 Corinthians 4:5).7

Surely the proclamation of the gospel, new believers, baptisms, and churches established where Christ was not known will magnify his glory. But the story of his glory will not be told only through the moments we know how to count.

Even much of a missionary’s labor is ordinary and unseen: language studied, luggage packed, sickness endured, prayers offered, relationships slowly tended, and conversations that appear to lead nowhere.

The same is true around Katie’s table. Jesus’ resurrection means that “in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58). Ordinary work received with gratitude and offered in faith and love can bear fitting witness to the world God has promised.

Diapers are changed. Papers are graded. Seeds are planted. Meals are prepared. Loads are hauled. Medicine is taken. Streets are swept. Toys and crayons are returned to their places, however briefly.

Much of this beauty will never be noticed by crowds. It does not need to be. The Father sees it. Christ receives it. And in the world he is making new, nothing cultivated in the Lord will finally be wasted.

Gathered and Sent

Sent identity is more than a private way of understanding our individual lives. When awakened, it is best expressed together.

Winfield Bevins describes the final movement of Christian worship as a sending. In the early church, after God’s people had gathered, heard his word, and come to the Lord’s table, they were dismissed back into the world with a benediction: Ite, missa est, meaning, “Go, you are sent.”8

That order matters too. The church does not gather merely to receive spiritual resources for private survival. Neither does it gather merely to be assigned more work. We are welcomed, nourished, reconciled, and formed in the communion of the Triune God. Then we are sent back into the places from which we came.

The church’s mission is not simply the sum of whatever its members do. But the church does not cease to be a sent people when its members scatter. Having received the gospel together, they carry its truth, goodness, and beauty into the particular lives they have been given.

Not everyone receives the same assignment or season. Some will be set apart to cross cultures with the gospel as a primary vocation. Others will remain and help recognize, prepare, release, sustain, and receive them back, all while living out their own sentness. The contributions are distinct, but they belong to one body and one shared identity.

Not long ago, someone from a church where I had taught sent me a picture of a shirt bearing the words, “We are loved. We are sent.” The congregation had begun speaking those words at the end of their service. Members had also written a song about becoming Christ’s witnesses. An idea had become a benediction, an image, and a melody. Missiology was entering their shared imagination.

For them, sent identity is becoming more than a personal insight. As its members are discipled to inhabit ordinary life with open eyes, they are also learning to discern their different places within the church’s witness. All are being formed to hold their lives open before Christ.

At the same time, this church’s commitment to sending missionaries to unreached peoples is actually increasing and improving. Their missionaries are less like detached specialists carrying a task that belongs only to them. They are members of a people who affirm their calling, share in some measure of their sacrifice, help sustain their obedience, and receive them as gifts when they come back.

Sent identity has not watered down the priority of going to where Christ is not named. It seems to have helped it make sense to everyone again.

Received and Offered

In a few minutes, I will leave for donuts. Later I will drive to the office. Katie will open books around a table and begin another year of work that very few people will see.

A flight to Kenya and a morning around the homeschool table are not the same canvas. Calling either “missions” may blur rather than honor them. Yet neither lies outside discipleship to the sending Christ. One may assist others in carrying the gospel across cultural boundaries. The other receives four particular lives as neighbors to be loved, beauty to be cultivated, and disciples to be formed and sent. Both belong within the movement of divine love and the life of God’s sent people.

Sent identity does not ask us to crowd more religious activity into lives already full. It invites us to receive the peace of Christ, offer our seasons of vocation to him, and remain available to whatever part he gives us within the shared witness of his church.

You are loved. You are sent.

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My life changed a few years ago when I saw my first “spark bird.” A spark bird is the first bird that awakens you to the world of birdwatching. Most people live almost completely unaware of birds apart from an everyday pigeon or buzzard. But once you realize that hundreds of different kinds are there—and that they are beautiful—you start to see them everywhere.

Mine was an indigo bunting. I was looking into the backyard and just happened to see a curiously bright blue object moving under my daughters’ swing set. It was stunning. Within a few days I had the Sibley Field Guide to Birds along with a new set of binoculars, and could be found wandering aimlessly with my phone held aloft while the Merlin Bird ID app identified birdsong.

Yep, bird nerd.

Maybe you’ve not yet experienced a spark bird and think birdwatching is lame. Fair enough. But I have come to believe that missiology can awaken us in much the same way. Many Christians live almost completely unaware of it apart from a few familiar passages, especially the Great Commission in Matthew 28. We know that Jesus told his disciples to go. We know that missionaries cross oceans and cultures to make disciples. But missions remains one subject among many, a small cluster of verses perched near the edge of the Christian life.

Is it possible for something to spark?

What if every Christ-follower began to see that the entire Bible reveals God’s mission—and that it is beautiful? What once seemed like a specialized assignment may begin to open up the whole Christian life. We start to notice movement everywhere: God creating and calling, giving and gathering, sending and receiving.

The world of Scripture might become even more stunning. Along with the world in which we live. And even the world to come.

Hidden in Plain Sight

Part of the reason we struggle to see mission in the Bible is that our usual words for it are not the Bible’s primary vocabulary. Missions and missionary are useful words Christians have developed to describe the work of crossing cultures to make disciples of all nations.1 Those terms matter deeply. But Scripture gives us other important missiological terms. One that appears from beginning to end is send.

Once I began to notice that word, it became a kind of field mark. God sends his word. He sends his Spirit. He sends messengers, prophets, kings, and witnesses. The Father sends the Son into the world. The Father and Son send the Spirit into the world. The risen Son sends his disciples. Churches send their members. Again and again, the people who receive God’s grace are caught up in its movement toward others.

But send is not the only field mark. Hidden in that previous paragraph is another essential word: receive. In the redemptive pattern I am tracing, sending is ordered toward receiving—even though what God sends is often rejected. A word is spoken to be heard. A gift is given to be welcomed. A person is sent in the hope that someone will receive them and their message. At their most fundamental level, the movement of both communication and relationship depends upon this sending and receiving.

As a former missionary and a seminary graduate, I have the “biblical basis for missions” pretty well memorized. I’m accustomed to bounding from passage to passage showing God’s heart for lost people in all nations. I’m also accustomed to watching only a fraction of people respond to that teaching with any interest in missions.

What if the problem is not simply the dull hearts of people? What if the way we present missiology sometimes contributes to their disinterest? When it arrives as a chain of proof texts organized around specialist vocabulary, I’m no longer surprised when Christians see it as a slice of Scripture for a specialist group.

Words like sending and receiving may initially seem too ordinary to carry much theological weight. Perhaps that is part of their beauty. They are not clever replacements for missions and missionary.2 Of course, not every appearance of send or receive is a missiological reference. Their significance lies not merely in their usage, but in the larger story they help us recognize. Together, they help us see a recurring biblical pattern in the movement of God’s redemptive love.

And their roots reach further back than the Great Commission—or even the world itself.

Before There Was a World

Before there were mountains or oceans, nations or languages, there was only God. No heaven and earth. No people. No problem in need of repair. Only the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit being God from eternity past.

God was not lonely. He was not lacking. Within the union of the Triune God there was communion: glory expressed and shared, love given and received. Jesus provides us a glimpse of this mystery when he prays in John 17:24, “Father . . . you loved me before the foundation of the world.” Before there was a world for God to love, the Father loved the Son in the fellowship of the Spirit. Before there was a mission to accomplish, there was relationship and communication.

I want to be careful here. Scripture does not describe eternity past as a missionary journey within the Godhead. The Son’s being sent into the world belongs to the story of creation and redemption. But Scripture does show us that the life of God is not cold stillness. It is living union and communion—love moving in gift and reception, initiative and response. Mission does not arise because God needs something outside himself. It flows from the abundance of who God already is.

This changes the emotional center of missiology. Mission begins in history with creation, not with a crisis. Its source, however, lies deeper—in the eternal fullness of the Triune God’s life and love.

The Pattern Comes into View

It is no wonder, then, that the Bible opens with movement. The Spirit hovers over the face of the waters. God speaks, sending forth his breath (Psalm 104:30), and light breaks into the darkness. A world comes into being—not because God needs it, but because his goodness delights to give life.

Creation culminates in a man and woman made in God’s image. God blesses them and says, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over it” (Genesis 1:28). Before there was a Great Commission, there was a mandate: a human family receiving God’s blessing and vocation, then filling the earth under his loving rule.

Sin then fractures that calling. Divine movement is resisted: what God gives is rejected rather than faithfully received, and what was meant to move outward is withheld. The man and woman hide from God. One brother murders another. The ground itself groans beneath the curse. At Babel, humanity gathers not to fill the earth with God’s glory, but to make a name for itself.

Yet God does not abandon his purpose. He disperses humanity throughout the earth, forming languages and cultures. He calls Abram to leave his country and kindred for a land he will show him, promising to bless him so that “all the families of the earth” will be blessed through him (Genesis 12:1–3). Abram receives the blessing of God and is sent out for the blessing of others.

From there, sending and receiving continue as the rhythm of Scripture. God sends Moses to bring his people out of slavery, then forms Israel to bear witness to his saving presence among the nations. When Israel forgets that calling, God sends prophets to speak his word and call them home. Foreigners like Rahab and Ruth receive the God of Israel and are themselves received among his people. Solomon prays that those from distant lands will hear of God’s name, and the psalmist asks for God’s blessing so that his saving power might be known throughout the earth.

Again and again, what God’s people receive is intended to move outward. The Old Testament ends leaning forward. The sending God is about to come near.

Eventually, God does more than send another messenger. “When the fullness of time had come,” Paul writes, “God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Galatians 4:4–5).

There it is again: sending and receiving.

The Father sends the Son; through the Son’s death and resurrection, estranged people can receive a place in God’s family. God’s movement toward the world creates our movement home.

After his death, Jesus rises bodily and enters a locked room filled with frightened disciples. “Peace be with you,” he says. He shows them his scars, speaks peace again, and only then says, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” Then he breathes on them: “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:21–22). The peace comes before the sending. The grace comes before the calling. Jesus is not merely recruiting workers for a project; he is drawing beloved sons and daughters back into the mission of his Father. Even their sending begins with receiving.

At Pentecost, the Spirit fills the disciples and they proclaim the gospel in languages once divided at Babel. People from many nations receive the good news, become part of a new family, and begin carrying it from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria and toward the ends of the earth.

Seen within this story, the Great Commission is not an isolated command dropped at the end of Matthew. It is the whole biblical drama spreading its wings. The Father sent the Son. The Father and Son sent the Spirit. Now the Triune God sends the church.

Together, those who receive the gospel become living witnesses, so that others may receive it in turn. They are instructed to disciple, baptize, and teach obedience to the commands of Christ, participating in the gathering of people into communion with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The remainder of the New Testament reveals how this forms communities, churches where the divine movement flows in, among, and through them.

Once we learn to recognize this pattern, God’s mission begins to appear everywhere—not only across Scripture, but within the relationship and purpose into which God has called all Christians.

Something sparks. The missionary task remains a particular assignment, but God’s global purpose starts to reorient the whole Christian life.

The World Mission is Moving Toward

The movement that began in the heart of God and entered creation does not drift forever. It is going somewhere. Revelation shows us a multitude no one can number, believers from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne and the Lamb. It shows the dwelling place of God coming to humanity: “He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (Revelation 21:3).

Sin and death are gone. Satan is defeated. Evil is judged. Nothing unclean enters the new Jerusalem. No inhabitant remains estranged from God. No neighbor needs to be told, “Know the Lord,” because all know him. There will be no missionaries crossing cultures to plant churches, no gospel proclaimed where Christ is not named, no wound without hope of repair. The saving work of “missions” will be complete.

But the completion of missions does not empty eternity of purpose. Sometimes Christians imagine the world to come as little more than an eternal worship service—as though earthly life gives way to an everlasting song with nothing else to receive, make, explore, or do. Scripture gives us a more spacious vision. The Bible ends not with souls escaping the earth, but with heaven and earth made new.

A garden-city comes down from God. Scripture does not disclose the full texture of that life, but it shows enough to assure us that redeemed creaturely existence will remain active, embodied, communal, and purposeful. It appears that rivers flow through it. Trees bear fruit. Feasts are thrown. Cultures and languages remain. God’s servants serve him, see his face, and “reign forever and ever” (Revelation 22:3–5).

Of course, all of this is worship. But worship in the new creation will not be less than song; it will be the whole life of a healed creation offered joyfully to God. The story that began with image-bearers commissioned to exercise God’s loving rule over the earth continues with redeemed people reigning with the Lamb. Human vocation is not discarded. It is restored.

The eternal communion of the redeemed will not be static either. We will not be absorbed into God or become a fourth member of the Trinity. We will remain embodied creatures, gloriously united to Christ and filled by the Spirit. God will give, and we will receive. We will offer ourselves in love to him, one another, and all creation. The nations will bring their glory and honor into the city. We will share in God’s rule, receive the gifts of one another, and participate in the life of a world with no scarcity, suspicion, or curse.

The relational grammar from which sending and receiving arise will remain, though its salvific form in a fallen world will be fulfilled. God will no longer send witnesses among the lost to seek and save. Rescue will give way to reign; witness to sight; proclamation to praise. Yet purposeful movement will never be exhausted. The world to come is not what remains after God’s mission. It is what God’s mission has been moving toward all along.

This is what I mean by the Beautiful Missiology tagline, “Reflections on God’s beauty in his mission to make all things new.” Any biblical account of God’s mission must include the world to come—not because salvation remains unfinished there, but because new creation is its goal and everlasting fruit. This mission includes “missions,” but it cannot be reduced to “missions.”3 Its source lies in the communion of the Triune God; it unfolds in creation and redemption, and arrives in a renewed world where God’s people share in his communion and reign forever.

The saving work is finished. The purpose takes flight.

Once You See It

This is what a spark bird does. It does not put birds in the trees; it awakens you to what was already there. In the same way, learning to recognize the sending God is not meant to impose a missions theme on Scripture. It opens our eyes to the story that has been moving all along.

The next time you read the Bible, follow that movement for yourself. Notice who gives and who receives. Watch for the God who speaks, calls, blesses, sends, gathers, comes near, and ultimately makes all things new. Let the familiar passages remain familiar, but do not leave them isolated.

Matthew 28 belongs to the other 1,188 chapters of the Bible. The commission belongs to the communion.

Once you begin to recognize the sending God throughout Scripture—and see that he is beautiful—you may start to notice his work everywhere: in the world and in the world to come.

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Scars are fascinating things.

We all have them. Most are hidden; many are invisible. Whether they come from physical or emotional wounds, our natural tendency is to conceal them. Scars can feel embarrassing—a reminder of hard times, a picture of our vulnerability, a mark left by something we would rather forget.

Take a moment and consider where yours are.

I don’t know what it is about me, but throughout my life people have shown me their scars. When I was in first grade, the school brought me into a classmate’s counseling sessions because I was the only person he would talk to. Complete strangers have spilled their guts to me, only to stop suddenly and say, “I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.” People I’ve visited in the hospital have pulled back their bandages to show me their wounds.

It’s strange.

But never as strange as it would be for someone to invite me to put my finger into their wounds.

The Scars He Kept

This is precisely what the risen Jesus invited Thomas to do. After Jesus appeared to the disciples, Thomas—who had not been present—refused to believe their testimony:

Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.” John 20:24-25

Thomas is often remembered for his doubt, but his words convey something more than uncertainty. This appears to be—as the Italian artist Caravaggio would later portray it—incredulity: the state of being unable to believe.

More accurately, unwilling to believe.

But I understand his resistance. I, too, have dug in my heels with panged unbelief. This is how we respond when the hurt seems to come from heaven itself.

Perhaps the risk of a new injury was too much for Thomas. The wound was still fresh. Seemingly nothing good could come from more vulnerability.

His refusal, however, only heightens the contrast in the next verses:

Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.”

Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” John 20:26-29

In the seventeenth century, Caravaggio imagined the scene with unsettling physicality.1 Jesus does not merely display his wounds from a safe distance. With compassionate determination, he takes Thomas by the hand and guides his finger into the opening in his side. Thomas looks both fascinated and disturbed. In the words of my wife, “Honestly, this painting kind of grosses me out.”

Perhaps it should. Caravaggio refused to make the wounds of Jesus tasteful, just as the risen Jesus refused to hide them. He did not ask Thomas to overlook the marks of his suffering or move quickly past them. Rather, he drew Thomas’s attention directly toward them.

The risen Christ makes himself known not despite his scars, but through them.

The Glory of His Wounds

In the perfection of his glorified body, Jesus remains a scarred man. The marks in his hands and feet where the nails were driven, and the cavity in his side where the spear pierced, are among the clearest signs that the risen Christ is the same Jesus who was crucified. Resurrection has not rendered them meaningless or embarrassing. It has disclosed them as signs of his glory.

As David Mathis observes, if Luke and John had not told us about the wounds, we would probably assume that a glorified body would bear no scars. At first, they might appear to be defects—remnants of something resurrection should have erased and forgotten. “That Luke and John testify so plainly to Jesus’s resurrection scars,” Mathis writes, “must mean they are not a defect, but a glory.”2

The book of Revelation gives us the same startling picture. In Revelation 5, John sees Jesus as “a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain” (v. 6). The Lamb bears the marks of slaughter, yet he stands. Crucified, yet risen. Slain, yet enthroned. His wounds do not diminish his beauty. They magnify it. They reveal the nature of the One who conquered through suffering love.

The Wounds That Speak to Ours

In this world, following the Lamb does not spare us from scars of our own. Sometimes they come through circumstances we never chose. Sometimes they come precisely because we chose to follow him.

Love made us vulnerable. Obedience proved costly. Pruning cut to the quick. Service exposed our weakness.

In such experiences, I have been tempted to withdraw in shame. I assume I must have done something wrong—that God has rejected me. I isolate to nurse my scars. I become incredulous, not only about what happened, but about the God I was trying to trust.

Yet each time, I eventually find that the hand reaching for me bears a scar.

The Lamb does not patronize me with a distant “There, there.” He does not explain away the wound or hurry me past it. My ruptured trust begins to heal precisely through his wounds. They show me that the God I fear has abandoned me is the God who entered suffering and still bears its marks.

The Scars We Need Not Hide

The day will come when faith gives way to sight. We will embrace him, hold his hand, feel his arm around our shoulders as we laugh together, pass bread at the table, and sit with our feet in the current. And the Christ we meet will still be the Lamb who was slain. His scars will not be hidden from our eyes. They will remain sure signs of the love that brought us home.

That future can form our life and witness now. If the scarred Lamb stands at the center of the new creation, then his people need not pretend to be unbroken.

We need neither to parade our wounds for effect nor conceal them as disqualifications. We can become a people unashamed of scars, allowing the places where Jesus has reached for us to bear witness to who he truly is.

Edward Shillito called him “Jesus of the Scars”:

“The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak;
They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.”3

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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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