“Is it worth it?”
The question seems to climb out of her unbidden. In the pause between asking and answering, she looks at me with pleading eyes, vulnerable and uncertain. We’ve been working together to care for a family who have recently, abruptly, returned from the field. Their needs are great, their disorientation and grief greater still. We bear witness and lend our prayers, our strength, our resources, our faith. We hold them together even as they seem to disintegrate into ribbons of pain, complex and slippery in our hands.
I work with families as they prepare to go, are on the field, during furloughs, and as they return. I’ve been here before. Heard this question before. I’ve asked it myself.
It feels taboo—a question we’re not meant to ask as “good Christian women.” How many of us memorized the Great Commission in Sunday school as children or felt its call on our hearts as young adults? The Bible is undeniable. Our God is a God of compassion and love. His father-heart delights in his children turning to him, and he gathers them in from every tribe and nation and people and tongue. He invites us to have a share in his work of transformation and abundance of life. Mission matters. Eternity matters. Precious, beloved people, eternal souls, coming to him matters. How can we ask if it’s worth it when this is the very heart of God? When we ourselves owe so much to those men and women, early followers of Christ, who so faithfully sought to bring the good news to the ends of the earth?
“Is it worth it?”
My first impulse is to give the well-learned Sunday school response, “Yes, of course!” But there is real pain and suffering here, real cost, real bearing of one another’s burdens and partaking in shared grief. It cannot, should not, be so easily dismissed.
Yes. This is worth it.
And yes. There is a cost.
In the moment, I fumble for words to adequately express all my thoughts and emotions around the question. But now, with time to think, this is how I want to respond.
Crossing cultures and languages and oceans for the sake of the gospel will leave you forever changed. You will grow in your relationship with God as you come again and again to the end of yourself and what you can achieve. You will see his faithfulness and provision, his kindness and wisdom and sovereignty in new ways, and you will grow in trust and dependence on him. You will learn to love people you previously had nothing in common with. You will learn to love a place you never knew before, and you will find that your heart and home is in more than one place on this earth. You will be reminded that your true home is in heaven, and you will ache and rejoice in equal parts at being a citizen there. You will see with new eyes the trappings of your home culture and wrestle with frustration and disappointment and overwhelm. You will fight to see the good and wonderful and the things that are worth rejoicing over in your home culture, and you will find them again.
Maybe you will encounter suffering, poverty, persecution, corruption, danger, disappointment, loneliness, grief, and loss in ways that you never have before. Maybe you will find yourself reckoning with a privilege you never saw was there. You will certainly have times when you are uncomfortable, frustrated, and confused. Language learning, culture learning, visas and airports and governments and systems will, at times, leave you weary and done. You will have ordinary, boring days, days of frustration and fatigue, days of homesickness and longing, days when your heart breaks and it seems impossible it could ever be put together again. You will love and be loved with a freedom and generosity that takes your breath away. You will find family and friendship in unexpected places. You will laugh until your sides heart. You will have endless stories of treasured memories and experiences with people you love and who love you so dearly. You will see God’s hand at work, see people and communities, towns and nations changed by his love. You will have days of rejoicing and wonder and praise. You will never be the same again, and you will feel the weight of that. You will, at times, need others to help you heal and carry the load. Although weeping may endure through the night, joy comes in the morning. You will bear both the scars and the delights.
And at the end of it all, I hope and pray, you will be able to look back and say, “It is worth it.”
How has cross-cultural work changed you?
