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Building Bridges

One of my favorite parts of the YouTube community is the interaction you get with people. I love building bridges between people, and even though we’re enjoying vacation in America, it’s been especially fun to bring our Japanese viewers along for the ride, so to speak. Many have never had the opportunity to travel abroad like this, so they can via our online family.

With all of our videos, people become more and more curious about the missionary life. Being a missionary is about the broadest vocations that I can think of. Missionary can mean a social worker or disaster response, it can be a doctor or nurse serving in a missionary hospital, it can be an accountant or administrator making things work behind the scenes (think my dad or my good friend John) or an orphanage. It can mean running a coffee shop or it can be a church-planter who lives abroad and helps get things started (think us). It can mean a traveling speaker or evangelist, or a local pastor — and the list goes on and on!

But perhaps the greatest thing all missionaries have in common is that they live internationally, inbetween two (or more) cultures, building bridges and traveling frequently over them. As missionaries, we give up a normal life in our home country to move to another place and figure it all out there. Our main priority (after God) is people! Serving them and helping them in whatever capacity God has made us to serve. In order to do that, we have the support of many people all over the world.

Since one of a missionaries’ main priority is people, it means that traveling to see those people also becomes a priority — whether it’s in our home country to see family, friends or supporters (like this trip we’re on now) or when we’re living abroad, traveling, getting to know people and places, adapting to a new culture and serving. All of these elements go into being a missionary. A good missionary can feel just as at home in one culture as another.

Often, we give up things like new cars, big homes and other nice luxuries in order to have money for trips, hotels and ministry. Our priorities help us channel our resources of time, energy and finances accordingly, and we’re always striving to make the most of what God has given us, because we will all be accountable to God for what we did with the lives that God gave us. My prayer is that we can live our lives well before God and help others do the same!!

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