Are you a missionary? The footprint test –

Posted on by livinggodsmission

by Demi Prentiss

Michael Piazza is the pastor of Virginia Highland Church in Atlanta, Georgia. In his Oct. 26 edition of “Liberating Word,” his blog, he wrote:

From out of a small Sunday school class in Scotland went a young man named David Livingston. He went to Africa, traveling from village to village treating the sick and telling them about God’s love. Many years later, a missionary visiting one of those villages began to tell a story about a gentle compassionate man named Jesus. An old woman interrupted him and said, “Many years ago that man visited our village, but we called him David.”

 

From a Sunday school in Scotland, you get the footprints of Jesus in the sands of Africa. Are the footprints of Jesus to be seen where you live and work?

 

How would your life be different if you saw yourself as a missionary of God’s compassion and grace? We are not the kind of missionaries who claim to have all the answers and demand that people change their mind and see it our way. Our only job is to offer a word of hope, the hope we have found; a touch of grace, the grace that is beginning to change our lives; a sign of compassion, the compassion offered to us when we least deserved it.

In the places where you live and work and play and study and drive and shop and worship, are the footprints of Jesus visible there?  How might you encourage others – and yourself – to make sure those are the footprints you leave?

Seven daily mission fields?

Posted on by livinggodsmission

by Wayne Schwab

“You say ‘living God’s mission.’  Just where do I live God’s mission?”

“Sam, you live it right where you are each day from Sunday to Saturday.”

“I’m in lots of different places each week.  Like here I am, at supper with my family.

  • I started with them at home this AM.
  • I went to work.
  • I read the papers on the bus – the local paper for city news and the Times for Barack’s State of the Union.
  • Time in the hobby shop over lunch.
  • And, on the bus home, an ‘arrow prayer’ for my sister’s marriage .”

“Those places are mission fields, Sam – your home, your work, your neighborhood, your part in the issues of the world out there, your leisure time at the hobby shop, and your spiritual health in prayer.  God’s at work in each of those places, too, to make them more loving and more just.  My guess is that you were trying to be caring and fair — to be God’s person — in each of those places today.  You were already part of God’s mission.”

“What?  Me, a missionary!”

“You sure are. Sam.  And I bet that before the week is out you will be reading another lesson at church – your seventh mission field.”