The Very Worst Missionary

by Jamie Wright

  Feeling victorious over the disaster of this day, Steve and I would high-five each other as we swaggered out to the street to greet our dinner guests…only to find that our car had been stolen.

  Hi. Hello. Welcome to my life.

  It was like that all the time. Nothing ever happened that was so crazy or devastating we felt like we needed to pack up and leave, but the relentlessness of it all exhausted us.

  But here’s the thing. We still believed we were there for the right reasons—and a person can put up with a lot of crap for a long time when it’s for a good reason.

  People stay in terrible jobs for decades simply because that job provides for their family. A parent will sacrifice desperately needed sleep to care for a sick child night after night. People endure the torture of chemotherapy for the chance to love and be loved here on earth a little while longer. Women go through the ache of labor and the agony of pushing a basketball out of their hoo-ha to bring little human beings into the world. And do you know why we do all that? Because it’s worth it. The human spirit can and will endure incredible things—humiliation, hardship, unimaginable pain, and relentless suffering—if there’s a purpose.

  Steve and I became missionaries because, in a fantastic leap of altruistic faith, we believed it would be worth it. We uprooted our family, disrupted our boys’ childhood, and upended our entire future not just because God asked us to but because we actually thought maybe God had something important for us to do in Costa Rica. We could live in a house that smelled like a swampy graveyard, we could deal with all of our stuff getting stolen, we could work through the isolation and the loneliness and the depression—as long as we believed God had an actual purpose for us there.

  The worst part of the worst year of my life was a growing realization that perhaps none of it actually mattered. As a missionary, I had a meaningful-sounding title, but it didn’t really matter if I never left the house. No one questioned what I did or didn’t do, so it didn’t make a difference if I did or didn’t get dressed every day. I could stay home in my pajamas and write a Facebook update about the weather, and I’d get ten comments in five minutes telling me how brave/awesome/exceptional/amazing I was for being there and how lucky Costa Rica was to have me.

  That was the worst part.

  I showed up believing I was called, expecting to be equipped and hoping to change lives, only to learn that Costa Rica didn’t really need another missionary. Turns out they already had gobs of their own churches and pastors and spiritual leaders—they had Bible colleges and seminaries, for fuck’s sake. Costa Rican Christians didn’t need North American Christians to teach them how to follow Jesus, and Costa Rican people didn’t need any more well-intentioned foreigners to come and “help” them. They were just fine before we got there, and they’d be just fine when we left.

  I showed up believing that Costa Rica needed me and that God would use me, but when I looked around at that beautiful country, at my hardworking neighbors, at the thriving church, I could only wonder, For what?

  God only knew.

  No, but really, I think He did.

  After the very worst year, we moved into a humble little house in a small neighborhood surrounded by coffee fields on all sides. Unlike the fancy-shmancy stinker of a house, this place didn’t have a water heater or a dishwasher or a push-button garage door with a clicker in the car. The powder room downstairs was so small Steve couldn’t stand upright without hitting his head on the ceiling or sit down without jamming both knees into the wall. There were heavy bars on all of the windows, and a big fat lock and chain secured the iron gate outside a dinky carport.

  Like many of the suburban neighborhoods in Costa Rica, this was a gated community, so everyone had to enter and leave past a tiny guard shack at the front entrance, where a uniformed man with a rusty revolver tucked into the waistband of his pants walked the barricade open and shut. With the front secured, another guard would “patrol” the streets by bicycle about once an hour, blowing a whistle at regular intervals to let people know he was out there, diligently protecting their property.

  When Steve and I first went to have a look, a friendly neighbor met us outside with the keys. She let us in and started to show us around, but then she stopped abruptly, saying in Spanish, “Do you like dogs?”

  We looked at each other and shrugged. “Yeah, dogs are cool.”

  She said, “Wait right here!”

  We watched her run back across the street to her house and return holding a bundle, and then she plopped the sweetest, cutest, fluffiest puppy I’d ever seen into my arms. Grinning, she said, “I thought you might like to hold her while you look around—she’s looking for a home too.”

  A little black ball of fur gazed up at me with big brown eyes, and it was obvious this lady was trying to sucker us into taking that puppy off her hands. I honestly couldn’t think of a worse idea than taking on a dog at that point, so I held the fluff bucket out at arm’s length, preparing a proper rejection in my head. I made a show of looking the dog over critically, and then I said, “Oooooooohhhh, shmoopy-whoopy-pwecious-poopy-pie, I wuv you, yesh I do! We’ll take her!”

  Steve stared at me, his head cocked and his lips pressed tightly together like, Why did you do that???

  About two weeks after we moved in, our little pup was weaned and ready to join us, but when I went to get her from the neighbor, she was pouncing and playing with the rest of her roly-poly littermates, and it broke my heart to think of her all alone at our house. I couldn’t bear the thought of being the one to tear that little baby away from her whole doggy family. I just couldn’t do it! So instead of bringing home a puppy? I brought home two puppies.

  Steve still hasn’t forgiven me, but the kids were thrilled.

  We named the super chill little bear of a dog Osita, which means “little bear,” and we called the other one, who was golden blond, high maintenance, and always causing trouble, Gringa, which (more or less) means “white chick.”

  I don’t know if you know this, but puppies are a pretty good reason to get up in the morning. Mostly because they’re cute and funny and ridiculously happy to see you, but also because, if you don’t get up and tend to them, they’ll eat, shred, and shit on everything you own. I’m not gonna pretend those energetic balls of love cured my depression, but they helped an awful lot.

  Those two puppies and that humble little house in a small neighborhood surrounded by coffee fields breathed new life into me.

  For the first time in a long time, I felt like I might be home.

  It might not have had hot water, but with the exception of the teeny half bathroom tucked under the stairs, natural light reached into every corner of the house. The new place was half the size, but sharing a wall on either side with the neighbors had made the old house feel dark and caveish, more like a place to hide from life than a place to live in. Situated on a corner, with windows on three sides and a sunny backyard, our new home felt vibrant and alive, and while it couldn’t be described as a house with great views, you didn’t have to go far to find them. Not twenty steps from the front gate, I could stand and watch the morning mist pour over the top of our mountain to roll down across acres of coffee, shaded by avocado and banana trees. Just a few houses down, an empty lot full of tall grass and weeds made the perfect spot to watch Turrialba, the nearest active volcano, belching impressive plumes of smoke and ash into the sky. Even the carpenter ants were charming, snipping foliage and flowers from nearby trees and marching down the street holding their bounty above their heads in a miniature parade. You just couldn’t watch them disappear into the ground without wondering whose party they were decorating for.

  The neighborhood brimmed with activity, and it was like the house itself stuck out into a world I’d grown good at ignoring. Now I was forced to take notice.

  During the day, sounds from the street filled the kitchen, which is where I spe
nt most of my time, because food. Obviously. The neighbor’s talking parrot chatted endlessly with no one, squawking his owner’s name, “Farah,” mimicking the tweet tweet tweet of the guard’s whistle, or just calling out, “¡Hola, lorito!” (Hello, parrot!) again and again and again. The conversations of the coffee pickers who used our road as a shortcut to get from one field to the next, with big round baskets slung over their shoulders, drifted indoors, as did the shouts of door-to-door salesmen walking down the middle of the street with their carts full of goodies: brooms, garden tools, VHS tapes, air fresheners depicting Catholic icons, and plastic baggies filled with mystery cleaning fluids. Since I was often home during the day, they would sometimes stop at my open kitchen window, tapping the iron fence to get my attention. “Machita,” they would call inside. “Brooms! Come see the brooms! Low prices!” In the morning sunshine, young mamas and old grannies pushed babies in strollers around and around the block while they gossiped on their cell phones. And at any given time, at least one neighbor would be playing a radio or watching a telenovela loud enough to be heard by all.

  In the afternoon the street would grow quiet and still, as every living thing made itself scarce before puffy clouds from both sides of the valley met overhead and thunder and lightning cracked the sky open. Rain came down in sheets against the windows, creating a watercolor mosaic out of familiar images—all the bits of life that I’d seen so clearly not five minutes before, now beautifully out of focus.

  I loved the rain.

  Rain in Costa Rica is one of those things that’s impossible to understand unless you’ve experienced it for yourself. It’s, like, more rainy than regular rain; bigger, stronger, wetter, even. It doesn’t just fall; it’s driven. It hits the earth with almost unnatural force, and once on land, it doesn’t run; it rages. Above ground the rain collects to lift and steal anything untethered, dragging it away. And underground it gathers power, rushing to return to the river, the stream, the ocean, where it patiently waits its turn to become the rain again.

  Rain can be destructive and dangerous. It can make you miserable. But you can’t live without it, and you wouldn’t want to, because after the rain stops, the world around you is better for it—fresher, lusher, greener, cleaner, and more alive. Maybe this sounds silly, but when the rain comes in Costa Rica, it’s like it comes to teach you a lesson.

  I especially loved the rain on garbage day, when we all piled our plastic sacks of trash on the curb to be picked up and earnestly prayed for the trash collectors to get to these piles before twenty stray dogs did. But inevitably, by 9:00 a.m. the street would be littered with moldy rice, dry chicken bones, fermented fruit rinds, smashed black beans, and every kind of rubbish. This made for a field day for cockroaches and other vermin, but a good hard rain would save us, washing away the rotten remains of a long week and leaving us with a clean slate.

  That’s what the new house felt like to me. It didn’t just look brighter; it felt lighter, like the air after a heavy rainfall. It was like a fresh start after my internal garbage had gotten out of hand. A clean slate after a very long, very messy year.

  * * *

  Around that time, one of the guys we knew started playing football. Not Latin American fútbol but, like, football football—pads, helmets, tackling, touchdowns—North American football. Knowing Steve had played in college, our friend asked if he would come out to watch his team practice, which of course Steve was happy to do. And that’s how he learned about the new semipro football league that had recently made its way into parks, plazas, and soccer pitches scattered around the provinces. With only a handful of teams, the league was heavily recruiting for more players and coaches.

  Surely you see where this is going….

  In his usual fashion, Steve jumped in with both feet. He first joined the league as an assistant coach, and then, when his team needed more bodies for eligibility, he became a player too.

  When people say, “God’s plans are more amazing than anything you could ever imagine for yourself!” I think maybe this is the kind of thing they’re talking about. When Steve was playing college ball, neither of us would have dreamed that someday he would find his way back onto the field, coaching in a foreign country and in a second language. (That would have been a pretty weird dream, if we’re being honest.) But doesn’t it actually make perfect sense that Steve’s path would lead him to football in Costa Rica in a super practical way? I mean, even though it seems like the most impossible, unlikely thing, doesn’t it follow that as we go about serving God, we would gravitate toward the things we’re already equipped, educated, and naturally gifted to do?

  It was the last thing we expected, but the best thing. The football community expanded our circle of friends way beyond the Christian missionary bubble. Awkward as it was, we were open with the other coaches and players about Steve’s day job, explaining that we had indeed come to Costa Rica as missionaries (he was still busting ass on the ministry campus at least five days a week, so it’s not like it was a secret). While the Christian community tends to blindly revere missionaries, we’d noticed that other people seemed a bit more skeptical and, well, weirded out by them. And as we got to know the players better, some of the guys were brutally honest with us about how both long- and short-term missionaries were often perceived by locals, and that was as lazy, spoiled, entitled, patronizing, and just plain annoying. By now this wasn’t exactly a shock to us.

  To their credit, our new Costa Rican friends easily forgave the naïveté and arrogance that had dropped us on their doorstep, and our relationships with the players and their wives and girlfriends were refreshingly free of the awkwardness and distrust that the word “missionary” brings to the table. With their gracious acceptance, we made our way into a community of real human beings who talked in normal words, said what they meant, asked good questions, challenged our perceptions, and shared their opinions based on personal experience and stark reality. I can’t begin to tell you how exciting this was after enduring so much spiritual gobbledygook in the la-la land of churchianity.

  Soon I could count on a full house for dinner a few nights a week, as players dropped in to share a meal or just hang out. Sometimes we ended up singing folk songs and dancing salsa after filling up on salchichón, carne asada, and micheladas, but more often than not, our friends stayed late into the night to talk about life, and faith, and following Jesus.

  On the football field and hanging out late, Steve escaped the ball and chain of his day job. There he was just Coach: a leader, a teammate, and a brother. Without ulterior motive, he got to know his players well and looked for ways to encourage and support them both on and off the field. Watching all this play out, I started to understand something I’d failed to grasp before we became professional missionaries: Our calling is not what we do as much as it is who we are while we do it.

  * * *

  In one night game on a makeshift field in San José, Steve was playing defensive line for the first time in nearly two decades. Seeing him in full pads and a helmet, I sincerely worried that my husband was too rusty and old to be out there, but about five minutes into the game, I realized my concern was unnecessary. On the field Steve had natural size on his side, plus skills and years of experience. He’d be fine.

  But the other spectators chattering in Spanish, trying to figure out the rules of a new sport, were a constant reminder that this was a different time and place. Uprights were fashioned from lengths of PVC pipe held to the vertical posts of existing soccer goals with zip ties and prayer. They swayed in the breeze that ruffled through a forest of banana trees just beyond the end zone. At the snack bar, a hamburger included a slice of limp deli ham (because Costa Rica), and a syrupy shaved ice came with a layer of powdered milk in the middle and sweetened condensed milk drizzled on top (see ham note). I sat down to watch the game with a paper plate of mushy french fries and a Coke Light from a bottle, which had been thoughtfully opened and poure
d into a plastic bag tightly knotted around a straw, and nothing says “We’re not in Kansas anymore!” like holding a sack of warm soda.

  After the first play, I anxiously watched Steve peel himself off a pile of bodies on the field, as I had so many times so many years ago. And I was amused to suddenly realize that I knew precisely what came next. He would give another player a hand up, then he would tighten the Velcro on the backs of his gloves and, casually flipping his mouth guard with his front teeth, rest his hands on his hips to catch his breath while the refs conferred—which is exactly what happened. And just as I had in a different lifetime, I had taken my place in the stands above the fifty-yard line, where I sat washed out in the glare of stadium lights, chilled from the butt up by an aluminum bleacher seat, lamenting that I’d gone with fries instead of nachos. It was all so different, and all so exactly the same.

  See, God has this weird habit of bringing our lives around full circle, so that things we thought we’d forgotten, the stuff we thought was behind us, even the history we fear will always define us, can become the very thing we use to bring others into the fold, recycling the fabric of our lives into some form of redemption.

  That football season, I came home one day to find a giant pile of smelly football gear waiting for my attention. Jerseys needed to be washed and folded, helmets and shoulder pads needed a heavy dose of disinfectant, and the water jugs needed a good rinse before it could all be packed into the back of our clunky Hyundai Galloper to be hauled out to the field for the weekend game.