by Jamie Wright
Anyway.
I wrote about our family adventures, like when our car broke down in a Nicaraguan border town and we hitchhiked with our kids to the nearest bus station in the back of a toothless stranger’s pickup. And I wrote about things that were less fun, like the time I sat in howler monkey piss on a riverboat, far from home, and hours later I smelled so bad someone drive-by-sprayed me with cheap perfume. And the time a scary dude on the bus asked if I wanted to buy some cocaine and waved his machete in my face. (That’s not a penis euphemism—it was an actual machete. Good grief, get your mind out of the gutter!) When Steve blew out his knee playing football and had surgery at a nice private hospital in an emerging third-world country, I wrote about it. And when the standard-issue Costa Rican hospital gown wasn’t wide enough to cover his butt or long enough to cover his junk, I took a picture. And then I wrote about that too.
The point is, I wasn’t posting mind-blowing stuff all over the Internet, but my corner of the Web was gritty and funny and sometimes brutally honest. It was amazing to me when complete strangers showed up to read along and leave comments or shared entries with their friends. (This amazes me still.) Part coffee-shop chat, part confessional, part courtroom, my little public journal soon grew beyond its original audience and original purpose. No subject was off limits, no person beyond reproach, and no process above critique. Which means that eventually I dove headlong into the complicated feelings I had about missions and missionaries. Admittedly, this was a pretty bold move for someone who was still suckling off the missions tit, so to speak, and it often felt scary and counterintuitive. Nevertheless, I felt I owed it to God and to the church to tell the whole truth.
With an awkward mix of trepidation and defiance, I began pulling back the curtain to give outsiders a better view of short-term mission trips and the long-term missionary lifestyle. To my great relief, the world did not stop spinning. Instead, I heard from loads of people—trusted friends and total strangers around the globe—who were working through similar fears and frustrations with all manner of churchy bullshit.
I was not alone.
I was not the only one sitting in the aftermath, when the carefully crafted Christian facade has collapsed. It was like the air beginning to clear after an explosion, and I was seeing the faces of other stunned survivors stumbling around to find a safe place in a new landscape. Huge numbers of them came forward to express similar misgivings and to ask similar questions about how to love our neighbors and serve our planet in healthier, more productive ways. I wasn’t the only one who figured something wasn’t right. And for the first time in a long time, I thought maybe I wasn’t just being an asshole.
Not everyone agreed with that assessment.
Let me tell you, if one old lady gets super pissed off when you write on your blog that you said “Jesus Shit Balls Christ” after you dropped your drawers to find a gecko creeping right up on Cupid’s cupboard, you can imagine what happens if you take to the Internet to ever so gently suggest that perhaps the current state of Christian missions is a billion-dollar Dumpster fire.
It’s not pretty.
It turns out, there are actually lots and lots of people who don’t like to have their good intentions, perceived sacrifices, and church-sanctioned vacations publicly questioned. I’m dead serious when I say these are generally decent, well-meaning people, but they’ve been throwing material and human resources into the missions machine without a second thought for as long as they can remember. They don’t know what to make of it when you come out of nowhere and tell them they should, for the love of God, stop. They are shocked by the sudden news that they might be doing more harm than good to the very people they’re trying to help. And they don’t like it.
Lord knows a good missionary would have kept her mouth shut about all of it. But I never claimed to be a good missionary, and as the readership of my stupid little blog inexplicably continued to grow, I felt more and more compelled to say these things out loud. It felt like my spiritual duty to speak up.
So I did.
On the blog I started as a wannabe world changer, I dared to suggest everything about missions is not as awesome and amazing as I had once expected. I mentioned that long-term missionaries sometimes lack a healthy work ethic, sometimes use manipulative language, and sometimes straight up do not belong out there. And then I went on to challenge the claims of life-changing greatness made by their short-term cousins.
I asked them to take a long, hard look at the dangerous messages we send to impoverished and marginalized people when we show up on their doorstep to “bless” them with ourselves, our stuff, and our ideas.
I dared do-gooders to look at the big picture. To see how it emasculates a father when we send a bunch of squealing teenage girls with matching T-shirts and brand-new hammers to build a shack for his family over spring break. To consider the impact on small businesses, day laborers, and skilled workers when we show up in their communities to do for free the very job that would have allowed them to put food on their own tables. To acknowledge how orphans are emotionally injured when a never-ending stream of smiling volunteers comes and goes from their lives. And further, to ask if the kids in an orphanage are orphans at all, or if they have been abandoned by struggling families to be raised by a corrupt system that thrives on our ignorance and good intentions.
I defied them to do the math.
In the States, does donating more canned food and collecting more clothes year after year after year speak to the success of serving underresourced communities, or does it indicate a continued failure to help them find their way out of poverty? When Thanksgiving Day is over, and cities across the United States are trashed with actual tons of uneaten food and Styrofoam containers, have we made the lives of those who must live in the aftermath of our “service” better? The sewer rats think yes! But do the residents? I mean, do they really?
Very quickly I learned what happens when you threaten the Christian status quo. People who benefit from “the way it is” (in this case, comfortable suburbanites, long-term missionaries who draw a paycheck off the church, and short-term travelers collecting passport stamps in the name of Jesus) will try to discredit your opinion by devaluing you as a person.
Who are you to judge? they demand to know.
Who was I to complain about the very system that had gotten me into missions in the first place?
Who was I to cast doubt on the people who came before me?
Who was I to wonder about God’s intent for the church and for the world?
Who was I to ask such questions? And what they really wanted was for everyone to see that the answer was Nobody. That way my opinion was worthless.
To be honest, back in the day—way back in the tender beginning of my journey with Jesus—that bullying tactic might have shut me up. Back then, I might have been content to pull on the missionary mask, adopt the vague spiritual language, and fill a blog with feel-good stories featuring the immeasurable importance of lame euphemisms like “loving on people,” “planting seeds,” and “being a blessing.”
But that time was long over, and that chick was long gone.
When I landed in Costa Rica with my husband, three sons, and a life stripped down enough to be weighed in pounds and ounces, I wasn’t a confused little girl anymore. I wasn’t a brazen teenager or a needy young wife or a lonely, exhausted mom. I was still broken and wounded, yes, still weak and struggling in so many ways, but in following Jesus, who makes space at the table for everyone, I had discovered my own worth. I was now a woman who knew that despite her brokenness she was intrinsically valuable, not just to God but to the world around her.
I am a woman who’s grown confident in the knowledge that her value is not up for review by a flawed and fragile church but already affirmed by the One who knows her best, loves her most, and equipped her over a lifetime to see and to speak up. So when the Internet hordes expr
essed their displeasure, it truly didn’t bother me. When they called me a disgrace, an apostate, a heretic, I genuinely did not care. But I confess that when they tried to make me feel small and insignificant by calling my inherent worth into question, that girl in her badass boots and black leather jacket resurfaced to respond.
Who am I?! I’m so glad you asked. I am the flawed, faithful follower of a radical leader, the lost and found daughter of a good king, an unlikely agent of hope and healing in a hurt world. I am a mother, a sister, a wife, a neighbor, a friend. I am nobody. Just a grown-ass woman with an opinion and a voice. And bitch? I’m pretty sure I was born to call out this bullshit.
If our calling is who we are, not what we do, and our equipping is our practical capacity to serve others, then, based on who God created me to be and how He equipped me throughout my life, I think maybe I was drawn to Costa Rica for the express purpose of seeing how naïveté and brokenness like my own have affected global missions and humanitarian aid, and then inviting whoever would listen into a difficult but necessary conversation about setting things right.
Isn’t it possible that’s how God would use a cranky, cynical, opinionated, depressed, introverted, moody follower of Jesus to do a bit of good in a tiny Central American country teeming with white weirdos from the North?
God knew I was never going to be a good little missionary. I just don’t have it in me. And I think that’s exactly why I was there.
If I had to pick one word to describe my journey as a missionary, I would choose “amazing”! Just kidding! I would say it was “confusing.”
In two words? “Super confusing.”
Three? “Super fucking confusing.” You get the idea.
The only thing I can say with any measure of confidence about how things went down in Costa Rica is that it was way too sloppy to be all God’s doing and far too miraculous to be all mine. I believe we were both in it, making our own contributions to the story as it unfolded. But I think sometimes it’s hard to tell where God’s part ends and ours begins, because shit gets kinda squirrelly when the designer of the living universe is all up in your business.
For the longest time I didn’t even have language for this thing that happens when your calling meets your equipping and then cool stuff abounds, the way I’d seen with Steve on the football team and then (even more surprisingly) with me on my blog.
I would read awesome viral stories that showed up in my news feed about just the right person doing just the right thing at just the right time, and I’d wonder, What is that? Like the eighty-year-old army vet with medic training from the Korean War who just happens to be there to help when he gets stuck, alone, between floors on a hospital elevator with a woman in labor. Or the off-duty firefighter who pulls an unconscious motorist out of a burning car on a deserted country road after a random wrong turn. Or maybe a little group of tenacious punk-ass middle schoolers who see somebody acting suspicious while they’re out being obnoxious in their neighborhood, so they call 9-1-1 and end up chasing down a would-be kidnapper on their bicycles.
What are we supposed to call that?
In the world we call it a “coincidence” and in the church we call it “a God thing.” But I’ve begun to think it’s more of both, some kind of practical magic that happens when your personal capacity comes crashing into God’s desire in some unexpected way, at the most unusual time, or in the strangest place. So these days, when I see ordinary people and an extraordinary God working together to make something good happen, that’s what I call it—practical magic.
At the very center of this idea is where our stories become truly incredible. When we do what we were designed, equipped, and educated to do best, in the company of a God who continually nudges us in the direction of love, I think that’s when we find ourselves in the most productive, most compassionate, most life-changing spaces. Practical magic is why, when we tell our own stories, we can’t help but say corny things like “God only knew” and “by the grace of God,” even when saying such things seems trite and simplistic.
Looking back across the expanse of my own life, I could easily point to this journey as evidence that miracles happen and God is in control. All I’d have to do is tell the simple but amazing story of a little Jewish kid / rebel youth / teen mom who gave her life to Jesus and became a Christian missionary, and church people would love it. They eat that shit up, for real. But there is another way to look at it, one that paints a fuller but far more complicated picture of how God and I ended up in Costa Rica together, and how it was on purpose but also kind of by accident.
In this version of the story, curiosity and contemplation are part of who I’ve always been. I was just born this way. Then, as a goofy kid, I was encouraged to ask big, annoying questions and to seek real answers, as the earliest formation of my faith and the base upon which everything else rests was built from bricks of Jewish clay. Out of that introduction to God I carried more than just warm memories of the last night of Hanukkah. I’ve held on to more than a scant handful of Hebrew words and an abiding love of kosher deli pickles the size of my forearm. Through the practice of those ancient rites and rituals I learned, very young, that God loves and expects our questions, and though I stopped practicing ages ago, I never stopped asking.
Later, while I was an insecure teenage girl hiding behind a tough front, I accidentally grew a thick skin. Ew, not, like, literally. I mean the figurative kind of thick skin that helps a person receive criticism, handle opposition, and even stand up under verbal attack. It’s a “fake it till you make it” kinda thing, and I’d gotten so good at pretending I didn’t care what other people thought of me that eventually I started to believe it. When I was young, this exterior confidence was merely a facade, but as a grown woman and follower of Jesus, that toughness found a healthy spot to settle in my soul. Throughout my life, the ability to switch off the part of my brain that might otherwise long for the approval of strangers has been a gift.
Even depression, my relentless companion, will get its name in the end credits of this story for creating a gaping hole in my life—a barren, blank space that I would unexpectedly learn to fill with words.
So while it’s true that on the surface I was probably the most unlikely candidate in history to become a Christian missionary, that’s not the cool part of the story. The cool part is that if God was angling to change a broken system and wanted to spark conversations and ask hard questions (knowing that some people would come back swinging), on a purely practical level, I came highly qualified for the job.
Is it obvious or extraordinary? I’m convinced the answer is both. Our lives unfold in ways that are both plain and mysterious, because God’s equipping is practical, but His redemption is magical.
The thing is, to be practical is to be accountable. It requires that we embrace the most sensible means of service to others and forces us to evaluate our work based on real results and to determine our success based on actual outcomes, rather than on personal intent. The practical way is not ambiguous, it’s not mysterious, it’s not romantic. And no matter how well trained and prepared we are, a practical approach to making the world a better place (whether for one person or for one million) is still no guarantee that we will achieve what we hope.
Practical magic asks us to admit when we fail, to cease what is harmful, and to fix what is broken, because what’s practical implores us to do better—but what’s magical frees us to keep trying. That God can redeem our garbage does not justify our churning out the same mindless crap over and over. The magic of redemption invites us to try something new. And in this we don’t need to feel ashamed or humiliated by what we didn’t get right the first time, for in His desire to heal the world, God wastes nothing.
Not even the very worst thing.
* * *
In Costa Rica I also learned that if you want to love someone well, occasionally it really is as simple as “see a need, fill
a need.” This was true for me on a dark and stormy night when a hungry stranger came knocking at my door.
Squeaking, actually. He was squeaking at the door.
I could barely hear it over the high winds and heavy rains, but I’m kind of sensitive to stupid, annoying background noise. When I yelled at my kids to “shut off that god-awful game before I throw it out the window,” they said they weren’t playing games, so I went on a rampage to find the culprit. I finally figured out that the nonstop squeak squeak squeak was coming from right outside the front door. This was a little bit alarming, because the front door was about fifteen feet from the front gate, which I knew for a fact was locked, so the squeaker, whoever it was, must have either broken the deadbolt or squeezed through the bars. Neither of those prospects made me want to open the door, but that awful squeaking was making me wanna punch babies, and I had to make it stop.
As soon as I unlatched the door, the wind pushed it open and an emaciated kitten, no more than a month old, looked up at me. It had appeared out of nowhere in search of food, shelter, and a sucker to con.
Well, it had found the perfect mark. I was obviously a lady who spent a great deal of time in her pajamas and who could appreciate a discerning feline’s taste for high-priced cat food with words like “meaty filets” and “rich gravy” on the label. All the kitten had to do was meow through the gap under the front door eleven thousand times, and when it finally opened, there was Sugar Mama, bathed in light from above, like an angel with a soft, doughy lap just waiting for the right kitty to come along and sweep her onto her big fat ass.
Why, hello there.
That tiny wet blob of black fur looked up at me with eyes that were way too big for its head, then marched inside without waiting for an invitation. Of course I rushed to offer our little guest a plate of rice and beans, because that’s just what I did, and while it attacked its food, I looked it over carefully. The scrawny fluff ball (a) did not appear to be injured and (b) did appear to be a girl.