Of missions, miracles and Maiki (part one)

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.

Of missions, miracles and Maiki (part two)

Having a border collie puppy in my “old age” has been a long term dream, but it has usually been impossible because of my lifestyle and ministry commitments. Just a few weeks ago, I was actually offered a puppy, but sadly had to say no, because of ministry travels planned for this spring. Then several things all began to happen at once.

I began to sense that God was cautioning me not to make the ministry trip planned for this March. I sensed He was showing me several reasons to stay at home: 

• firstly because I have a lung condition and am in the list of “at risk” people who are advised not to travel during a pandemic. Various friends and intercessors had been exhorting me not to travel unnecessarily.
• secondly, because the Brexit situation means that I am without health care at the moment, and this makes any kind of health emergency (like getting bronchitis or covid) a lot more expensive. I'm battling to get into the Spanish healthcare system at the moment and leaving the country could jeopardise that process.
• thirdly, I felt the Lord was showing me that spending money on multiple PCR tests and a stay in an expensive quarantine hotel was not good stewardship of resources for the sake of just one week of meetings.
• fourthly, various missionary leaders had been telling me they’d felt prompted to cancel their travel plans because they might seem “reckless” in the current climate and possibly not a very good testimony.

Just as I was beginning to sense a big question mark over my March trip, airlines began sending emails saying that flights were cancelled, and European nations began closing their airports to flights from outside the EU. It was beginning to look as if travel might become impossible and not just unadvisable. At the speed things were changing, there was a very real possibility of being stranded somewhere if airports took even further measures while I was out of the country. Paradoxically, a number of different people who knew of my desire for a dog just happened to take initiative to tell me that they’d be happy to look after my dog whenever I had to travel in the future.

Early in February, I was in a large (online) gathering of missionaries and someone shared a prophetic word about our being called to enter through the narrow gate and walk on the narrow path. (Matthew 7: 13 - 14) The gist of the message was that we should not compromise, embracing current ideologies of what is “politically correct,” and neither should we wander from the narrow path for the sake of our own preferences or comfort. Strange as this may sound, I felt prompted to respond with a prayer of willingness to lay down my dog dream. “Lord,” I prayed. “I have dedicated my whole life to following you in steps of faith and obedience. If the ministry path you’re currently calling me to walk on is “too narrow” for a dog to walk alongside me, I’m okay with that, and I willingly make that sacrifice again.” Amidst some tears (because it’s been a dream for such a long time) I left it at that.

Ironically, just two days later, the adoption association got in touch again and told me the puppies had been rescued and were now old enough to leave their mother. There was a little female border collie for me, if I wanted her. When I saw the video, I began to have a growing sense that God was saying, “This is my gift to you, my daughter. It’s the right time to say yes.” So I told the association that I was interested.

But there was one final obstacle: much of Spain is currently in perimeter lockdown. That means that you are not allowed to go beyond the borders of your own town, unless you have written police permission (called a justificante) to prove that your journey is for a genuine emergency. The puppy was 500 km away in the region of Extremadura and it didn’t look as if there was any way it could be sent down to Andalucía; also it was far too small to be sent by any kind of courier service. I would need to find out if I could get police permission to go and pick it up.

So I phoned the town hall and the police station to explain my situation and ask if I could get a justificante to go and pick up the puppy, which had actually been offered to me before the lockdown began. The police assured me that a dog did not count as an emergency and there was no way I would be given police permission to venture beyond the limits of our town. The only people allowed to travel at the moment, they told me, are the military and the national police force. 

So, that was that. It looked as if the puppy was an impossibility after all. “Well, Father, I prayed. “Perhaps this is a sign that the timing isn’t quite right yet. It would take a miracle for this particular puppy to be able to come to Málaga, and you would need to do the impossible for me.”

About an hour later, I got a phone call from the adoption people. “We have amazing news,” they said. “A friend in the policia nacional is able to bring the puppy right to your doorstep. He can bring her on Friday if you simply pay the transport costs!”

If I needed any confirmation that I wasn’t making a selfish mistake and that it truly was the right timing for a puppy, this was it. Only a miracle could make it possible for a little rescue puppy to be driven 500 km across the country with a police escort!

And so my baby arrived this weekend - the best Valentine’s present that anyone could have. I’m already in love. She’s a tiny little tricolour border collie and I’ve called her Maiki (pronounced MY key) an Afrikaans word that means “little friend.” (In Afrikaans, it’s actually written Maatjie, but I hate to imagine how people would try to pronounce that here…. so I’ve kept the pronunciation and given it a Spanish spelling.)

A dog is a 15 year commitment, and you don’t usually adopt a puppy when you’re 70 or 80 - at least, not without running the risk that it will outlive you. So I’d been aware for quite a while that “time was running out” if I were ever to get a puppy of my own. I feel very blessed now that the dream has finally come true. I’m still a missionary :-) and my lifestyle will still involve privileges and sacrifices. But now I’m a missionary with a dog, and it brings me great joy.

You probably won’t get it, if you’re not a dog lover yourself. But if you are, I invite you to rejoice with me.