Have Mercy, Will Travel [justin]

It was God’s Smuggler who first started the fire in Naomi’s heart for China. In the book, Brother Andrew tells his story about smuggling Bibles into communist countries, about the persecuted church, and about discipleship in places where you can’t just tell somebody to pick up the latest Christian commentary at the bookstore. It’s been ten years since Naomi first started learning, crying and praying for China. Her heart has changed over those years, both dwindling in emotional zeal and expanding in maturing wisdom, and in a few days this husband and wife team will be flying to China for a three-month stay. While there, we will be assisting a long term missionary friend, finishing up a TESL certificate, and finding out what God has in store for us.

The past month Naomi and I have been feeling the birth pains of going to China. There is excitement and thrill when thinking of such a grand adventure – that is, until reality hits and preparing for the trip occurs. Passport and visa paper work, training job replacements, airline tickets, making appointments for vaccinations, verifying what our insurance did/did not pay for, and the other million tiny things that you don’t think of till the last moment kept knocking on the door. But our “romantic delusion,” as Naomi puts it, imploded while finishing one single task: packing up our apartment.

Some might think that there is a lovely aestheticism in becoming missionary-like, but for us it was more similar to running a gauntlet. We’ve just celebrated our two-year anniversary and there hasn’t been a time where we were closer to breaking down as a couple. That says a lot especially when compared with the past few years where we had to deal with newlywed issues, the premature death of a mother, and Naomi going back to school while working almost full time.

You see, we, like most Americans, have too much stuff. Stuff is a technical term; it isn’t “junk,” which connotes no practical or sentimental value, but it is not “essential” either, meaning that we actually need it to survive or be content.

Both of us, for one reason or another, hated moving our materialism around. Fighting over what to keep, what to trash, and what to give away was a daily activity that kept building upon the previous round. Part of it was stereotypical boy/girl issues dealing with clothes (especially shoes), but underneath, a big chunk of the fighting had to do with where we were and where we had been with money and having “nice things.”

Naomi, while not poor, grew up not having a lot of money. Shopping at thrift stores and never quite fitting in with the prettier people was the norm. If she did get something nice, it was kept and taken care of for as long as possible; she never knew if she would be able to get another one like it and not getting rid of possessions was considered good stewardship. While that mentality was in Naomi, I had been kicking around the whole burn your TV in your yard ideology. I started to see the wisdom in simplicity and thought that this was a great opportunity for us (but more so her) to get rid of extraneous items. As Tyler Durden from Fight Club once said, “The things you own end up owning you,” and I wasn’t going to let that happen to us. Add to all that our imperfections with control issues, passive-aggressive guilt trips, and self-centeredness, and you have a recipe for relational chaos.

There was a lot I needed to be taught from all the fighting and bickering and walking out on each other. The story in Luke’s Gospel of the widow’s gift was a starting point. While it might have seemed that I was getting rid of more belongings, percentage wise Naomi was making the bigger sacrifice, particularly since she was emotionally connected with some of the items. I had to recognize that just because a few things were superfluous, didn’t mean that everything was. I had fallen into the pendulum swing that the church is famous for, going from one wrong extreme (the blessedness of materialism) to the other (all matter is evil).

The most prominent lesson that came from our relational angst, however, was that of loving your enemy. My favorite professor in college once said that the strongest Biblical argument for not getting a divorce was that Jesus taught and commanded us to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us. It’s hard to admit when a marriage relationship is on the rocks and you feel like you are married to the enemy. Couples usually want everybody to think that their relationship is happy and fine. But the truth of the matter is that the person who brings you the greatest joy is also capable of bringing the greatest pain. A wife’s kisses are the sweetest delight; a husband’s wounds, the most cruel; loneliness is never more vibrant as when it appears between a man and a woman sharing the same bed. There is vulnerability in sincere relationships, none more so than marriage.

But marriage was not designed to stay as a continual boxing match between partners. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but two people admitting they have both done wrong sure does aid in reconciliation. Naomi and I went away for our two-year anniversary, leaving behind the things that still needed to be done so that we could focus on rest and just being with each other. Towards the end of the trip we pulled into a parking lot where Naomi continued to read to me A Severe Mercy by Sheldon VanAuken. She read about the deathly snows and a real life fairy tale relationship that ended in tragedy. We embraced each other, cried, and mourned with love both about the story we heard and the story we were writing out with our own lives, whether beautiful or ugly or both.

While myriad reasons aid in making people adversaries in our lives, it’s only the grace of God that changes an enemy into a beloved. It was the Father’s mercy through His Son that turned enmity into love and as followers of Christ we are called to be peacemakers and extend the mercy we’ve been shown to others.

On the refrigerator at the in-laws house, where Naomi and I are staying before we leave, is a little piece of paper with one of St. Francis of Assisi’s most famous quotes: Preach the Gospel at all times; when necessary use words. It is key to remember that the Gospel is more than words. I hope that concept will be burnt into my mind for the next few months as I deal with verbal miscommunication both in a foreign country and in a marriage relationship.