Missionaries in the Time of Corona

Today marks day 22 in quarantine. And we will be here for a certain minimum of 18 more days. After just 22 days, I really, honestly struggle with remembering what “normal” life routine was like. 

The first week was, dare I say, relished, by me. I am an introvert (at the time, spread a little thin) and the idea of two weeks being unable to attend any social gatherings was a tad exciting. I was going to relax, watch movies, read, cross-stitch, the usual introverted-25-going-on-80 activities. The first week was great. I got to do every lazy, nothing-to-do activity I wanted to.

And then the world went ablaze.

The amount of sheer information and panic being heaped onto me (and every person in the world) buckled my knees. At first it was precautions because of some virus in China. Then we blinked. And the world, country after country, came to a screeching halt. China, then Italy, then Spain, then America. My once-home. Ukraine soon followed suit, even though they were way ahead of the game. One by one, schools closed, restaurants shut their doors, buses only accepted “essential” people, and the subway stopped running. It was like Kyiv died in two weeks.

And now, 22 days later, I’m starved for human contact, under a stay-home order, watching the news while my original home burns.

The loneliness and hopelessness and purposelessness is crushing for even me, an introvert. I find myself sitting and staring blankly, thinking, “is this all life is?”

I’m grateful and very impressed with how well Ukraine has handled this pandemic. I’m actually much safer in Ukraine currently than I would be in America (didn’t think I would ever write that sentence). If the situation that is happening in America were replicated in Ukraine, the healthcare system would have failed after the first week. I am grateful to God for how he has given wisdom to Ukrainian leaders thus far.

But that’s not the case for all our friends in the mission field right now. Two families we know have already undergone emergency evacuations. All others are in quarantine, in isolation, in foreign countries. Our purpose as missionaries is to reach the country we’re in for the Gospel. And that’s pretty hard to do when you’re stuck on house-arrest. When I read about our friends being evacuated, my heart twisted in fear. I realized I didn’t want that, even as much comfort as America could bring me right now. I don’t know how I could cope being ripped from the country I chose to devote my life to because of an invisible virus that we can’t see and can’t seem to stop.

It wasn’t their choice. They were ripped out of the pot they had just gotten settled in and roughly shoved into a pot with dry soil. They don’t know when they can go back. They don’t know what they will do until they can. And my heart breaks for them.

When you do missions “right”, your heart desires to be among the people of the country you’re in. Why? BECAUSE YOU LOVE THEM. You love them so much you gave your WHOLE LIFE up for them. You accepted inconvenience, new culture, new food, new dress, new language, a new home, just for the hope you may tell them about the good news of Jesus Christ. To love a country so deeply (because you love the Lord that deeply), and to know you are where you’re supposed to be, only to be roughly ripped from that country, and set upon fifty layers of uncertainty, must be the most crippling feeling a missionary can face.

My heart aches for my evacuated friends and my heart aches for my isolated friends still-abroad. Even the words evacuation and isolation have this tremor of underlying fear to them. I feel like I’m huddled in a semi-safe corner while my America screams in pain in the distance. Do I put my hands over my ears or do I listen?

If I could slap one word over this time period it would be fear. Fear for safety, fear for health, fear for the economy, fear of isolation, fear of the unknown. And fear is the tool of the enemy. 

As I finish writing this, on day 72 of isolation, the world is very much the same as it was on day 22, and the world is very different than it was on day 22. In all this time of uncertainty, the one thing I can say for certain: Satan is advancing his army. The attack on humans, especially believers, is so prevalent, I can taste it in the air. The crippling anxiety of “what’s next?”, has paralyzed us completely. And when you stop standing, the enemy lunges.

Ephesians 6:13

Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.

This slowing, this screeching halt, this fear cannot win. We cannot let it. We may have lived the last few weeks in defeat, but we need to say no more. Our ministries are withering. Our ministry is paused. And souls are not being reached. And the enemy cannot win this battle. He has already lost the war, but he wants this battle.

Our ministry looks different right now. Our outreach has changed. Our communication has been drastically altered. We cannot gather. We cannot physically be together. But God will lead us through this because the church is not a building. We are one body, united together in spirit. This is the time we stand in awe of God’s gift of technology and virtual communication and use this gift. It’s time we stand up, brush the dirt off, and start sprinting back towards the finish line. We fell. But we will not stay down.

While my friends in foreign countries are being roughly transplanted back and forth between lands, I am filled with hope for them. Not by any of our doing, but because our God has made streams in deserts.

He can replant you 1000 times and he can replant you into salted earth and he can replant you among choking thorns and as long as his Spirit, is in that feeble, weak seedling, it can grow into the most magnificent of trees.

We didn’t want our ministry to look like this. We didn’t want our mission to look like this. But it does and it is going to be beautiful. People of all nations will come from this desert, hungry and seeking purpose. And the Lord will do something powerful if we submit to him. COVID-19 thrashed through our reality and changed life as we know it. And we are scared and we are lost and we are hesitant of what life means. And it is going to be okay. I choose to not live one more day in bondage. I choose to no longer be knocked down by the endless waves of spiritual warfare and fear. Because my God has set me free from that. Because fear is not the posture of the believer. This pandemic has changed so many things. It has changed how missionaries live, it has changed jobs and churches and ministries. But it has not changed our God.

The First Year

One year.

12 months.

52 weeks.

365 days.

It doesn’t even seem real that we have been in Ukraine for the aforementioned length of time. 

I woke up this morning to an average, cold, February day. I went to the gym, had a Russian lesson, hosted my father-in-law, ate dinner. It was all so…normal. So average. And in a lot of ways it has become typical. These days, not one like the other, that has rapidly become “life in Ukraine”.

So many days I still feel so foreign. So many times culture-shock comes out of nowhere. So many times I smile and nod at the woman in the store even though I have NO idea what she’s saying. In so many ways I am still so foreign.

But it’s home, too. My subway station is so familiar, I know exactly which elderly woman will be selling her home-grown vegetables in exactly which spot. I know which of my friends prefers Russian and which prefers Ukrainian. I can travel, shop, go, survive. 

The last few weeks have been full of nostalgia for me. After my first trip back to America, the holidays came up quickly and then this “anniversary”. So in a lot of my free time I catch myself lost in thought. Thinking and remembering. Mostly remembering.

I remember when I thought this dream God placed in our hearts was a far-off fantasy that would never come true. I remember thinking Ukraine felt so much more than 5000 miles away. I remember sitting in my college classes, distracted, thinking about what was happening in this part of the world.

And after that, I remember one of the hardest years of my life unfolding, every layer darker than the last. I remember the unspeakable horrors that crashed around me, threatening to bury me. Most of all, I remember that darkness. I remember choosing my pride over the loving embrace of God. I pushed everyone, everything, so far away that no one around could hear me scream. I crawled through that desert on my hands and knees, dying of thirst and all the while refusing the Living Water.

I remember that anger. I remember that rage. That feeling that God had ripped everything from me. Because he did. He wrenched it all out of my blackened, pride-filled grasp, begging me to reach instead for him as I fell so far. It’s terrifying to realize how easy it was to direct my rage at God. He was the only thing in my life strong enough to withstand that sheer hate-filled rage. But really, truly, the anger was just a more dignified way to cover my all-consuming pride and lack of trust.

By the time we moved to Kansas City, I was so defeated and broken, I couldn’t sing worship songs. I distinctly remember trying to read my Bible one day and throwing it at the wall in disgust. As I look back now, the only thing that disgusts me is my sin. 

I won’t say there was a “moment” in Kansas City that God broke through to me. But somehow, through those amazing people, at that amazing church, he chipped away this stoney wall I built up so high until it was a flimsy pile of scattered bricks. I began to learn how to open up again. I began to learn how to be vulnerable again. There was a shift. A beautiful, slow, unexpected shift.

I won’t say when we moved to Ukraine that I “had it all figured out”. I won’t say I was out of that desert. I won’t say I was “right with God”. I will say, God knew exactly what he was doing. 

I left my spiritual desert of America and entered my new, cultural desert in Ukraine. God slowly, lovingly, tenderly, broke me down, until I was flat on my face, prostrate in front of the cross. He was just whispering softly, R, I brought you where I always wanted you, can you just please trust me?

The first week in Ukraine, I sat in my bedroom, ugly-crying as God calmly opened up my tightly-clenched, stone-like heart and fists and patiently scooped out so much of my gangrenous pride. I was so tired of fighting Him. ‘Just let it go, daughter’. And I did. One by one I gave them up. The hatred for the man who hurt my mother. The death of my grandfather. The pain of betrayal for my previous church and youth group from a man we trusted. The list seems endless. I unclenched my stubborn, child-like grasp on sin and I blindly, through tears and fear, reached out to God. and he came running. Like the father in the story of the prodigal son, he ran to me and embraced me like he had wanted to do the entire time I strayed from him.

God led me from one desert to another. He led me from my twisted, hand-made desert of pain and anger and into this new, foreign, cultural desert. But he is the oasis. And when I stay near him, the oasis, I want for nothing. The difference in these deserts is enormous but the biggest is my heart. 

I don’t feel the heat of this desert. I don’t feel the dryness, see the emptiness around. Because now my eyes are fixed on my oasis. My lifeline in this crazy, wild adventure. He is my endless supply of water and I know what it means to refuse it. I know the dryness of a parched throat and pushing away the canteen because of pride. I know the ugly pain of slow deterioration, alone, after you’ve run from all those who tried to point the way to life-giving water. And I won’t refuse it today. I know more deserts will come. Each time I will trek through these deserts, sun-blistered, bleary-eyed, weary. But I can choose the Living Water, or I can choose pride. I know now what the cost is to choose wrong.

I won’t say that this last year in Ukraine, I have done amazing feats. I won’t say I have brought the Gospel to thousands. I won’t say I have been a 100% effective and perfect soldier for the Lord. I won’t say I have made history. I won’t say I have been a fantastic missionary. I won’t say I have changed many lives.But what I am learning through this journey is that God has changed my life. He has changed my heart. He has brought me out of one desert and into another just like in Hosea and he has spoken tenderly to me in the wilderness and he has told me exactly how much he loves me and what he is preparing me for. I hope I have changed lives so far in Ukraine, but I can’t say for sure. But what I do know for sure is that through this time in Ukraine, God has irrevocably, impossibly, changed my life and maybe for now, just maybe, that is enough.

While I Was Gone

I wake up to throbbing pain in my knee. A combination of 27 hours of travel and a rainy day will do that to an old, pesky injury. I slipped out of bed quietly, trying not to wake my sleeping husband, kicking myself for not doing my physical therapy exercises more. I limp to my living room and stare out my corner window, my favorite spot in the whole apartment, even though it’s cold and drafty and littered with cobwebs. I look up to the corner and see my favorite fly-catching occupant is still present after almost four weeks of my absence.

The rain seems appropriate. Sunny warm weather would feel insulting to wake up to after such a tumultuous few weeks. Had it really been less than four weeks? I stepped off the plane and back on to the Ukrainian earth and it felt like a lifetime had passed since I had been there, boarding a plane to America. I knew it would be hard. I knew it would be. But that still didn’t prepare me any better for the difficulty when it came.

The first time I cried was in O’Hare airport, in that tunnel with the rainbow lights. I felt like a deaf child getting hearing aids for the first time. English. I could hear it all, understand it all. English gave me some sort of superhuman hearing, it would seem. I got into that tunnel and felt so out of place. I was born and raised in this country, lived here for nearly 25 years, but now I was just a visitor. I looked at those lights, that pretty rainbow zig-zag across the ceiling and wondered why it was so beautiful and revolting at the same time. Ahh, that was why. Because of the excess. No Ukrainian could afford this. It wouldn’t exist in Ukraine. Expensive, lavish, unnecessary. But it was pretty. All it took was for my husband to ask, “Are you okay?” to send me to the corner, sobbing over lights.

It caught me off guard to see how life had simply gone on while we were absent from America. I know, duh, time doesn’t stand still just because you’re not in a place, this isn’t the Sims. But I guess some small, unspoken part of me expected that. It was like we had never been there and the world we knew just moved on. Only fundamentals were the same. For instance, when did they get a stoplight in Tiffin? How long had the ramp to 69S been closed from I-35? And when did all these babies of our supporters get so OLD?!

Oh.
I know when.
While I was gone.

When we got around to seeing what seemed like everyone, the same, few questions started to cycle through: Is it good to be back? How are things going over there? Are you settling in well? I looked at their faces, faces expectant for one answer. Because that is what they wanted. They wanted the same answer, most of them. They wanted me to gush about how amazing it was to be back in America, like I could breathe fresh air for the first time in eight months. They wanted to hear coming back was like finding an oasis in this desert of Ukraine, finding a flotation device in the middle of the ocean. 

There was no mistaking the confusion that flickered across faces when I said it was complicated being back and I really do miss Ukraine. But…how could I possibly not want to be in America? It’s the greatest country on earth right?

Right?

But the truth was, I was drowning. Suffocating. Because I will always be the split woman, always understanding, never understood. Always listening, never heard. Always searching, never finding. I was trying to stand on two tectonic plates while they shifted farther and farther apart. I was desperately clinging to both notions, unable to give up either identity, like grasping at water. I was no longer just a foreigner in Ukraine. But Americans don’t want to hear that, at least most of the ones I talked to didn’t. So eventually I just filtered what I would say and to whom, and swallowed back the bile rising in my throat.

“Because I will always be the split woman…”

More unnerving was the word “home”. When you’re a child of three divorces and over a dozen moves, “home” stops becoming a house in your mind and more of a general location. At first I was bothered when Ukrainians would say, “Are you excited to go visit home?”, or when Americans would say, “welcome home!”. In my head I was indignantly insistent that this (America) wasn’t my home. At least not anymore. What I didn’t  expect, however, was how the earth seemed to sway beneath my feet when someone asked me, for the first time, “When do you go back home (Ukraine)?”. I found my husband answering for me while I was rendered speechless.

When was I going home? I don’t know the answer. Because which home are we talking about here? Ukraine? Kansas City? Iowa City? I’ve called so many places “home” in my heart that I am not sure I will ever have an answer to that question.

There wasn’t a single minute to process any single thought, feeling, or emotion in those weeks in America. But now I’m back and I don’t have a choice. And I find myself running from the process harder than I’ve mentally run in a long time. Because what will I find there? In those shadowy recesses of my thoughts, the cavernous holes of my heart, what if there exists a line of thinking that is too painful to draw out?

I’ve called so many places “home” in my heart that I am not sure I will ever have an answer to that question.

What if I don’t love Ukraine anymore? What if these last eight months have been a nice adventure, but my soul thirsts for more America after just one small taste? What if this honeymoon is over and I’m ready to pack it in and leave for the States? What if I truly, madly, deeply, miss America? What if that cramping, unsettled sensation of not belonging sets in to the bones? What if I DO want those American nuances? The pumpkin patches, the college football, the roads without potholes gouged deep, the friendly smiling faces of the Midwest, trick-or-treating, double dates with favorite like-minded couples, drinking water from the tap, visiting my university, the friends that became like family,  my parents helping raise my future children, my sister to be the favorite aunt they run away from home to go see…all of it.

But the truth I am ever-so-slowly approaching is…it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if I love Ukraine. It doesn’t matter if I know where I consider home. It doesn’t matter what my native language is. It doesn’t matter if I don’t drink pumpkin spice lattes in the fall, don’t go to the farmers market in the spring, don’t curse the roads while driving in winter, or don’t sit on my porch, sipping lemonade in the summer. None of it matters.

What matters is I love Jesus.

What matters is Jesus has called me to be in Ukraine, so I’ll be in Ukraine. What matters is Jesus has said I am not a citizen of this world, but a sojourner, so I’ll wait for my heaven-home. What matters is Jesus is the bread of life, so I’ll give up all of the good, American lattes. What matters is that I am doing exactly what the Lord has called me to do. I know that. More than I know that I miss America, more than I long to be with my sister, more than I try to shape an identity based on nationality, I know that God has called me to be in Ukraine and is so close to me.

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in Spirit.

Psalm 34:18

God will continue to pick up the pieces of my broken heart and fashion it into something stronger and more beautiful. God will reshape my spirit into an undefinable force. For many years to come, God will continue whispering to me, “I will rescue you” as I fly over the Atlantic Ocean. When the years pass and culture strikes painful chords and I feel more and more lost as to what I am doing, God will pull me in close and tell me that I belong here…for now. But not forever. 

At the end of my life, whenever it is, I’ll sit at My Father’s feet and realize all this struggle, all the confusion, all this “not belonging” was nothing compared to hearing Ukrainian and Russian in heaven. While I worship Him in Paradise, maybe I’ll stand next to a Ukrainian that I mentored, or a Ukrainian to whom I told the gospel. When I see Jesus face-to-face, I want to look in his eyes, and forget the pain of goodbyes, the relationships ripped off me like a limb, the searing pain of loneliness,  the humility of language learning, the hurt of change again and again and again, and I want to hear him say, “well done my good and faithful servant”.

Because then it will all be worth it.

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