Frontline Missions
By W. S. A.
We had crossed over the border to communist Laos. We had traveled by boat, van and motorbike. We rested in a shade while one of the motorbike drivers went to fill his tank with gas. I asked the man “Have you heard about Jesus?” He casually replied, “Is it a big fish or a small fish?”
Communist China has opened up to the gospel, I heard. Vietnam is giving some slack. God has answered our years of prayers that were bathe with tears and blood shed in secret places. The downside is, the Christians in the free world has lost steam in sending missionaries to unconquered frontiers assuming that it will be reached someday.
I went back again to Laos through the back door and met with a few more persons armed with tracts in their language. I talked to some and left some tracts on tables in other places. Of all the people that I had talked with, in all those three times that I had been in the country, none, not one, had heard the name Jesus. Have we been deceived, have we been tricked into believing that we have advanced the gospel into all the far reaches of the world? Or is it that our present statistics and testimonies of missionaries, of having conquered many frontiers, made us sluggish to the imminent danger and urgency of lost souls not knowing God?
Where are the missionaries from America, France, Australia and the Philippines? These who are known to have provenly advance the gospel in many far flung areas of the world, even in Cambodia. Where are they assigned? Have the mission’s boards of these effective sending missionary countries been satisfied with the fact that most of our missionaries sent are coming to the countries as support group, prayer groups, and exposure groups? Very important mission, nevertheless, we need to pray, pray hard for more pioneers!
I have been diagnosed as already been burnt out. I know, I cry in pain not wanting to go on. I had told my wife too many times, “let’s go home.” But what about the new believers that meets at our house every Sunday for the past five months? Their praises and songs to God withstand all barriers and pain. In one of my depressing days, I stood by a bamboo pole nursing my unwholesome pity party. One Laotian approached me and said in wide open arms, “The one you told me.... the little books you gave.... you have to go to those villages... I need 200 more booklets... you have to go there....”
I did not understand him at first, he told me again and again, and when my Lao disc drive in my brain started kicking in, I said: “You mean Jesus who hangs on a cross (as wide as his arms are stretched)” “But did you know that what I gave might be illegal in Laos”
“It’s OK, just give me 200 little books, they need it in that village, and bring my wife along...” He said. Paul’s vision of a man from Macedonia calling for help, but this is different, we are not Paul, the feeling is more like as in the days in the old testament when it was said ‘the day for the baby to be born has come but there is no strength left to deliver it.’
We have made some headway. The church in the capital of Stung Traeng, Cambodia is doing very well with outreaches in some areas. Workers are trained. No doubt about the South, that has been established by God.
But the enormous work is far, far beyond us! You can travel another 500 kilometers and only find one Baptist church.
I have been blinded many times, torn between our circumstance and the vision we have to fulfill. Personal struggles, impatience to the fact that we have to wait for the seeds of faith that had been sown, to grow. Boredom - same fish, same river, same mud, same islands, same nights, same chickens (mostly brown, all 18 that have come and gone) same cats. Sorry, but I hate cats yet we had eight of them to fight the same rats that roll around the ceiling, to prevent those same rat -eating snakes, that crawl around our fences and run up and down the same trees. I would have to admit though that some events that are quite unpleasant are actually diversions, sometimes entertaining and breaks routine. Like when a snake wanted to ride with me in my boat while I was just learning how to drive it or when one fell from the coconut beside my wife. We had visitors who were not trained to track a mouse inside their mosquito net but they can shout well by instinct. What do you do when your boat is about to capsize while you are holding an engine on board and you fell off? (Now I know, but I’m still figuring out how to make the engine run again.) Until now I don’t know what course to take to tackle soil erosion, but what is obvious is my neighbor is already about to move his house after an eight meter landslide which leaves only 3 meters from the river bank to his bedroom. I have to figure this out before my house gets to be swept away by the Mekong River, my wife and and I still have 10 meters left.
God has been faithful though, my wife has been managing a lot of cases of malaria and typhoid at our house but so far we had not contracted the disease yet. In one occasion, all our female co-missionaries here up-north; including my wife, developed cysts but that too has been settled. What greatly bothers me is if we loose our cutting edge as Christians through our failure of sending more pioneers to the frontline. I do know that other ministries are equally important but if the current trend of sending missionaries to the frontline is getting less plus some of us that have been here have long been gone through depression, discouragement, sickness, suicide and backsliding, then I think we have an issue that really matters.
Only and only if there would be missionaries who would come...! We have to figuratively drag ourselves as we, many times, fail God in getting His strength going to another strength. But one thing we would like to hope that we would be able to survive to tell the story – God’s story.
Copyright © World Without Walls, Inc., 2017, Philippines.
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