Last week I had the pleasure to attend a conference for women involved in full time cross-culture work. Over 100 women working in over 30 different countries came together for four days of worship, prayer, laughter, and tears. For many of us, this was the first retreat that we had ever had, for ourselves, without any other co-workers/family members present. It was only us. One hundred fifty women singing to the Lord, immersing themselves in the Word, and having time just to BE.
In our average day-to-day activities, dealing with difficulties with other people, with the government, with our city or neighborhood– these things are just a part of life. It’s part of being human, and of living in a sinful and broken world. But as someone who has lived both overseas and in the USA, I can tell you that wrestling with these issues on the field magnifies their intensity. In addition to dealing with a stressful situation, I’m wading through the murky waters of cultural nuance that I don’t fully understand. Sometimes I get tripped up in the language, and people laugh because I’ve just said something SUPER inappropriate (I can usually laugh later, but at that moment I feel humiliated). Sometimes tragedy strikes in the USA, and I have no way to go back to be there for my family or friends. All of these things build up over years and years, and to have a safe place to unpack all of that, in an environment where people GET IT, is golden. They know where I’m coming from. They know we often pour a lot of our care into the people around us – our spouses, our kids, the people groups we work with – without a lot of time for ourselves. They know we often feel forgotten when we’re not visible to our friends and family in the States.
Anna, our speaker who served for ten years in an incredibly difficult, war-torn country, talked about courage on the field. Our first session, Courage when the Well Runs Dry, particularly resonated with me. She started with a question: “What if God asked you to have a ministry like Jeremiah?” Jeremiah’s ministry spanned about 20 years, and he saw the rise and fall of five kings in Judah. He was actively persecuted, betrayed, witnessed the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, and overall, saw very little fruit. Whatever steps forward the Hebrew people would take during a particular time frame, such as when Josiah was king, they would immediately take about five steps back. Jeremiah’s ministry was
dry. But spiritual dryness is not always from sin, or a lack of spiritual connection, or simply not doing enough. Sometimes it exists to drive our roots further into the ground, to draw on the deep water that lies there below. We need to lean into the dryness, and walk with the Spirit and be filled with it. Keep going when the well runs dry.
Our newsletters are often filled with the good things going on in ministry, what I like to call our highlight reel. What isn’t seen are the stories of failure, rejection, and hurt. We don’t share about the periods of spiritual dryness, of feeling like we're standing in a desert even though we are faithfully spending time in prayer and God’s Word. We don’t talk about when we’ve invested time, money, and energy in a supposedly Christian family, and they turned out to be lying to us about a lot of things. Or meeting with someone, discipling them for months, only to have them disappear off the radar forever. Did they go back to their home country? Move to another city? For every “success” story we have, there are probably ten stories about failure. But we keep going because God has called us, and He is good. So for those of you experiencing this period of dryness, I say to you: COURAGE. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the presence of faith. His Word will not return void (Isaiah 55:11).
