We had left our baby girl in the make-shift nursery to attend one of the meetings for our orientation that was to launch our missionary career. In the next few days, she would get sick with her first fever while we were trapped in a damp, chilly, tiny lodging with an outside shower that provided limited hot water. It was our inaugurating taste of “suffering for Jesus,” and it was miserable and gritty but grand.
In a roomful of fellow missionaries, some seasoned, others new to the field, the energy was palpable. We had gathered to reach the nations, just like I had dreamed as an evangelical teen on fire. The speaker spoke powerfully, and the one phrase that resonated in my young adventurous mind, the one mantra that would sustain me through some of the most stressful years of my life was this: long obedience in the same direction. The speaker was using the title of Eugene Peterson’s Christian classic, which I…show more content… And then two. And three and a half more years after that. There started a stirring in my spirit, like a pea at the bottom of twenty mattresses, which kept me tossing and turning in the dark night of my soul. That small pea quickly turned into a full blown faith crisis that first nudged us away from our missionary vocation, and then freed me to deconstruct my faith without the confines of institutional…show more content… Those who have been involved in the same work for decades are heroes to me for their steady service. And, yet, I also recognize the courage in those of us who have changed the course of our lives because we recognized the mission we were on held problematic elements. To continue long obedience in that direction would have meant living with increasing cognitive dissonance and disintegrating ourselves just to stay on that straight and narrow
