I’ve been a missionary for more than forty years. The missionary lifestyle brings a lot of blessings and privileges with it. It also brings plenty of challenges and sacrifices.
Among the privileges are the fact that you get to be on the front line of what God is doing in other parts of the world; you get to see His miraculous power in action and experience His miraculous provision for your daily needs. (Of course, you don’t need to be a missionary to experience these things. They are available to every believer, but sometimes the missionary’s full time ministry activity opens the door to more of these experiences.)
As a missionary, I’ve been able to visit other countries, get to know other cultures and learn other languages. I’ve become part of a global, international and inter-generational family of people, seeking to bring joy to God’s heart and make Him known to others.
The missionary lifestyle also has its own challenges and sacrifices. The missionary usually lives far away from family and from childhood friends. Most missionaries have embraced the adventure of “living by faith,” and don’t have the financial security that comes from having a regular salary.
It’s a fact of life that the missionary community is made up of more women than men; this means that a large number of those female missionaries will inevitably remain single throughout their lifetime. Life as a single missionary likewise brings its own blessings and its specific sacrifices with it.
The single missionary often has more freedom when it comes to scheduling and travelling. But there’s also a price to be paid for that freedom. It goes without saying that you won’t have children of your own, and it possibly also means that you’ll never have a home of your own; buying a house is a lot less attainable on a single low income than on a joint income. Even going on holiday can seem out of reach: there may be no one nearby to go with you, and you may not have the means to pay double accommodation costs (for single occupancy of a twin room.)
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges for the single missionary is the losses that come in times of transition. When a family moves to a new town or a new continent, they may lose friends and team mates, they may miss familiar things and places… but they take with them the people who are closest to their hearts. The single missionary, on the other hand, loses everything and everyone, and has that disorienting feeling of having to start life from scratch, having to make new friendships and build a new home all over again.
The different challenges and sacrifices are very real, and yet somehow they seem insignificant compared with the assurance of knowing that you’re in the centre of God’s will, and the privilege of being part of something that God is doing, something that will count for eternity.
It may surprise you, then, to learn that the sacrifice I’ve felt most keenly during these forty years of being a single, long term missionary has not been the lack of home or family or financial security. It’s been the fact that it usually hasn’t been possible for me to have a dog.
If you’re not an animal lover, you probably won’t “get it.” It might even seem slightly ridiculous in the grand scheme of things. Most people understand when a childless couple is longing to conceive, desperate for a child of their own and only too aware of the ticking of their biological clock. No one would dream of telling them that they should sacrifice parenthood for the sake of the ministry. Yet it probably wouldn’t occur to most people that the single missionary who gives up on owning a pet is actually having to sacrifice the only live-in family they would ever have. And the sacrifice is necessary because there is no one at home to look after the dog when the missionary has to travel for a ministry trip; it’s not like when a Dad goes on a trip and the rest of the family is still at home with the dog.
And so, except for a few brief years in South Africa, being dog-less has been one of the sacrifices I’ve made in order to embrace the missionary lifestyle.
In recent years, as I’ve grown older, I’ve begun to toy with the dream of having a dog of my own, one last time. (A dog is a fifteen year commitment, so you can’t wait too long before getting the last puppy of your lifetime…. or else you risk its outliving you and being abandoned when you go to glory.) I nurtured a hope that maybe I could get a puppy again by the time I was sixty… but it didn’t happen, as there were many ministry opportunities that simply made it unfeasible. And that was okay.
During this past year, I began to feel that God was giving me permission to start looking for a dog. It made sense: a year of coronavirus confinement and travel restrictions would have been the perfect time to get a puppy, as I was working from home all the time. But it didn’t happen. Available border collie puppies always seemed to be in the north of the country and covid restrictions also made it impossible for them to travel outside of their own province. I was able to foster a pup, which was a lot of fun, but the real dream, a border collie puppy of my own, didn’t become a reality.
As 2021 began, I was suddenly offered a border collie puppy and told it would be available in February. The dream was within reach…. but the ministry opportunities seemed to be opening up again… and I could never prioritise dog-ownership above the ministry responsibilities that God has entrusted to me. It looked as if the dream would need to be put on hold yet again….
But it seemed that God had other plans. Read on in the post below to hear of something amazing, even miraculous, that has happened just over the past week.
