Great forces such as love have an ability to amp up our motivations for action. We pull things we love towards and into ourselves. Similarly, we push away from ourselves things we don’t love.

The greater the prize—for example winning the world for Christ through foreign mission work—the greater our loves and our motivations to achieve it.

Yet, our motivations can be tricky. Our loves can be tricky. We all know that. They can be diluted through suffering and boredom. They can also be, and often simultaneously are, exaggerated through grandiosity.

Over the course of decades in foreign mission work, my loves and my motivations fluctuated. I didn’t change the world, the world changed me.

So much so that the title for the purpose of this article that best fits how I experienced loves and motivations is this: foreign mission as the incubator for love.

I will unpack that a bit through a selection of personal stories that cover at least 30 years of mission work. They briefly chart the launch of my mission career, the labor of the middle years, and the lasting impact foreign mission made on my loves and motivations.

My Launching: Elevated Loves and Enthusiastic Motivation

I launched differently than Christ did.

He arrived emptied;

He became human.

Obviously, there is more to this, but I have to stop at those two lines from Philippians.¹ They compel me somehow. It seems to me that Christ’s love-mission first came as a subtraction.

I came to the mission field filled. Filled with our strategy papers—how we would do our work—and our Memos of Understanding—how we would function as a team. Those were exciting days.

I loved the Word, and I loved the world, my two big loves proving my love of God and enough love to motivate my obedience to go into all the world.

I spoke elevation-ese, a form of self-aggrandizement (unrecognized at that time) dressed in biblical language (of which I was an expert):

“Becoming all things to all people...”

“Hastening his second coming...”

“Pressing on to grasp the prize...”

“Doing all things with Christ’s strength...”

There is much beauty in biblical language. Yet some-times this type of motivating language becomes a tool to cloak weakening insecurities and over-weaning ambition.

In those early days I experienced motivation as enthusiasm and confidence.

My Labored Middle Years: Depleting-Loves and Driven Motivation

Somehow, in the middle of overseas church-planting work, my cooperation with God’s plan became my competition with colleagues and with Islam.

The late Greg Livingstone, founder and director of Frontiers, once quipped, “Jealousy advances God’s kingdom.” We laughed uncomfortably. We got the point he was wisely making about mission motivation.

Competition is the whetstone that sharpens ambition, not love, I thought. I knew that feeling all too well. My colleagues sparkled with missionary glitter, and I wanted some of that.

It’s humbling to reveal this, but after each mission conference I attended, I would vow to do a better job at church planting so that next time I would have a story to share—maybe even be invited to speak.

Each success which brought joy also ratcheted up the need to do even better and more.

I experienced motivation as an exhausting effort to keep up with our goals and my need for recognition. I felt driven instead of led.

Love wilted. My love was inadequate to sustain suffering and my jealousies.

Love withered. Not because I wanted to “go big” but because my ego was too afraid to “go small.” I wanted to change the world yet found myself changing diapers. That frustrated me.

I expected to perform my missionary status perfectly, and I couldn’t. Those years were hard.

Frontier Mission’s Lasting Impact: Replenishing-Love that Flows rather than Motivates

As I come to the last part of this reminiscing, I breathe a sigh of relief.

It took a whole lot of suffering for me to know in my body that I needed help. I finally could see the people God sent to help me.

No heroes, no heroics, just friends and family and neighbors offering me simple acts of love. And with pride laid down, I could receive their love.

Because of them, I learned how to replenish love at its source: flowing from God through others. It wasn’t about spiritual highs, just human-size love incarnated in people.

This flow, I liken it to a river, moved me into the contemplative tradition. It also helped me understand how my mission-work metaphors shaped my practices of love.

Moving to the Contemplative

Seeking to help me when I was in spiritual crisis, my husband purchased a thick book on Ignatius Loyola. Thus began my flow into the river of the contemplative tradition. Because of tutelage by Ignatius and others in that era, I grew in the desires for and practices of what I now call My Delicious S’s: slowing, sabbath, simplicity, solitude, smalling, serenity, silences, savoring. Richard Foster’s book, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, helped introduce me to these authors and practices.²

Working the Metaphors: Channel, Cistern, Feather, River, Ocean

What we liken our missionary practices to, our metaphors, often become unconscious biases for how we do missions. These biases remain hidden but are extremely influential.

For years I saw myself as a channel of God’s love. By staying open to God’s love, I could channel it to others. It became a problem when I didn’t prioritize that love for me. And then I met Bernard of Clairvaux, 11th-century French abbot. He said I am not a channel; I am a cistern. The cistern fills with love and when love reaches the top it spills over.³ I began to focus on receiving love and to notice the ways I experienced sticking-love.

Eventually, I outgrew the cistern metaphor because it was too stationary. I was thinking of moving out of direct frontier mission work but felt stuck. I didn’t know what else to do. That’s when I met Hildegard of Bingen, a German Benedictine abbess of the 12th century.

She told me that while God had many important people to do his work and to preach his Word, he “was pleased to raise a small feather from the ground and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of anything in itself, but because the air bore it along. Thus, I am ‘a feather on the breath of God.’”⁴ 

This metaphor, when I reached my 60’s, gave me the freedom of choice and the lightness of being to move on to something other than frontier missions. I experienced freeing-love.

And now the metaphor of river has grown to a deep, deep ocean. I will include a link to a song I am left with in the footnote.⁵

I remain thankful for how frontier missions incubated and grew my love. I set out to change the world and instead I found myself changed.

The metaphor I am left with and the Persian poem that delights me every time I read it:

“TRIPPING OVER JOY”⁶

What is the difference 

Between your experience of Existence 

And that of a saint?

The saint knows 

That the spiritual path 

Is a sublime chess game with God

And that the Beloved 

Has just made such a Fantastic Move

That the saint is now continually 

Tripping over Joy 

And bursting out in Laughter 

And saying, “I Surrender!”

Whereas, my dear, 

I am afraid you still think 

You have a thousand serious moves.

—Hafez