Perhaps it was naivete, or maybe it was the years-long process of settling into life overseas, but it took a long time before we fully realized that one of our vital roles as missionaries is to be an advocate for resources.
We spent our early years just putting one foot in front of the other, doing the tasks assigned to us each day without thinking much beyond that. But once the haze settled, and once we lifted our heads a bit to look and see what others were doing with the long-term in mind, we realized that we could — and should — be doing something to connect nationals with resources they struggled to access otherwise.
Resources across the globe are distributed disproportionately. By definition, this isn’t fair. Some people, communities, and nations simply have access to different resources than others. Because my husband and I come from a passport country that’s disproportionately well-resourced, we began to consider what our responsibilities were in terms of sharing those resources with those around us in our less-resourced context.
The most obvious resource we could think of was of a financial nature. We live in a part of the world that struggles with poverty. I can never again underestimate how life-changing having access to money is because I can never forget the day our house helper asked for help to buy food. Her son had cried through the night because of hunger, and she’d had nothing to give him. He was the same age as our three-year-old son.
The words of James rang loud in our ears: “Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?” (James 3:15-16).
Our house helper needed food, but she didn’t have the money to obtain any due to difficult circumstances. And I was hit square in the face with this reality: Money matters, and only those who have enough of it have the privilege of not thinking about it.
Over time, through a myriad of events, we began thinking about how to raise extra funds in order to help with ministry needs besides providing for our own living expenses.
On the one hand, it was difficult to think of raising more money than we had already raised for ourselves to live overseas. Any fundraising missionary will tell you what a huge task it is to raise enough funds to entirely support oneself, let alone a whole family, to live and serve in a place that cannot pay a missionary to be there. Then add to that task and raise even more funds? We were not particularly thrilled at the idea.
But we had seen it done by other global workers in thoughtful and effective ways, and eventually we started identifying ministry areas that would make sense for us to specifically raise funds for.
The reality is, we have access to funds because we have access to people with funds, unlike most of our African friends and colleagues. As Americans, our connections with people from the West automatically put us in a category of having more financial resources than almost anywhere else in the world.
We’ve also discovered that people with such resources are often able and willing to give. When we’ve reached out to our support base with a financial request for a particular need, we have routinely been surprised and blessed at how generous they can be.
Through their generosity, we’ve helped with a variety of projects over the years: renovating housing, funding tuition for our family medicine residents, upgrading infrastructure and sourcing medical equipment for the mission hospital, and purchasing Bibles for friends and neighbors. None of that would have been possible without our personal connections to people in our passport country with financial resources.
Yet we’ve also learned over the years that our ability to access resources goes beyond our personal network, proving even more the unique position we’re in to connect outside resources with the people right in front of us. I can’t count how many times the Lord has brought us financial resources through unexpected means. We can testify that the “six degrees of separation” theory is real as we’ve been given money from people who knew someone that knew someone else who heard through the grapevine that we were missionaries and decided to support us.
We’ve received financial support from people who follow a different religion than us, from people we’ve never met who sent a donation in memoriam of the deceased, from people who legitimately couldn’t remember my name, and even from a prison inmate. We’ve also been blessed with financial donations we never asked or looked for. God’s creativity in how He chooses to provide never ceases to amaze.
The point is this: We come from a place with resources. Our African ministry partners would not have access to those resources unless we were here to make the connection for them. Our role as missionaries in our context is not only to provide medical care and medical education, but to bridge the gap between tangible needs and helpful provisions.
Our access to resources is not only financial, however. We also have access to educational resources. We know where to acquire Bibles and books. We know how to get an account with a resource library like RightNowMedia. We know how to find and fill out an application for an educational institution. In a world that’s increasingly shrinking in terms of worldwide connections, we can be a resource to help our African friends and colleagues find and navigate opportunities that will help them.
Furthermore, we ourselves are a resource because of our own education and knowledge base. My husband and I both went to university. I went on to get a master’s degree, and he went on to get a doctorate degree. This knowledge is its own resource, and we have the privilege of sharing it with others.
Understanding this transformed our approach to ministry. It broadened our scope beyond our originally narrow focus. It helped us think about and embrace a more holistic methodology about what we do. It has positively impacted our relationships and has given us greater perspective when we consider things like, “Do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased” (Hebrews 13:16).
Sharing what we have, material or otherwise, is indeed a good thing.
To be clear, I am in no way suggesting that we provide arbitrary handouts for the under-resourced. I live in a country where handouts have been given too often for too long, and I have seen the detrimental effects of such an approach to helping the poor. Rather, I’m in favor of providing specific and useful resources that are given to trusted people we know who will utilize said resources in a productive way, or who will learn how to do so as we walk alongside them and show them how to make use of those resources.
Neither am I suggesting that sharing resources is a one-way street. On the contrary, I think it’s only right and fair that we share what we have since our local partners are constantly sharing with us.
If they didn’t share their social knowledge with us, we’d have no idea how to begin navigating cross-cultural communication. If they didn’t share their produce with us, I still wouldn’t know how to properly cut a mango or mix thorn fruit with other fruits to help dilute the taste. If they didn’t teach us how to appropriately discuss death in the hospital (which is vastly different than how we do it in our own culture), we’d be offending and alienating people right and left.
Perhaps my favorite example of this is the first patient my husband ever cared for in Kenya. My husband, a highly trained and competent doctor, found himself face-to-face with a young man with malaria, tuberculosis meningitis, and HIV. He had never encountered any of these conditions during his years of training in America and was completely at a loss.
If it hadn’t been for an intern, whose training paled in comparison to my husband’s but who knew these conditions well, my husband would never have made it through that first day. He had so much to learn, and he was able to because of people here who shared their knowledge with him. Although my husband is now quite proficient in all manner of tropical diseases and water-borne illnesses after nearly a decade of working at a mission hospital in Africa, he never could have acquired that knowledge on his own.
Our journey of understanding more about sharing our resources is directly tied to our particular ministry context, but I encourage you to ask similar questions that helped us realize our responsibility along the way:
What resources do I have access to?
How can those resources be useful in my context?
Which people is God inviting me to share resources with, and how can our relationships be blessed because of them?
It’s been said that God has deep pockets. May we readily participate in emptying them.
Photo from Unsplash by Alex Radelich
