5.30.2011

Why I am a missionary...

As I was sitting in class on my first day of my second year of FOCUS New Staff Training (NST), I had this great moment of clarity for my role as a missionary. There are a lot of things that are being offered by campus ministries, bible studies, retreats, etc., but today, as I listened to Dr. J Reyes quote Blessed John Paul II, I was reminded of my unique and unrepeatable missionary call. This is basically why FOCUS exists, and why I am a missionary...

"People today put more trust in witnesses than in teachers, in experience than in teaching, and in life and action than in theories. The witness of a Christian life is the first and irreplaceable form of mission" (Redemptoris Missio).

I certainly haven't always lived it right, but this is exactly what I have tried to do this past year as a missionary-- to live my life as a Christian and hope that somehow I have been able to demonstrate at least the sort of "getting up when you fall" behavior that is essential to the Christian life. May the Lord continue to bless my efforts to answer this missionary call.

Please pray, as I do today and throughout my missionary life, that, like Saint Paul, I, too, may say to those I am serving, "Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ" (1 Corinthians 11:1). O, that the Lord might grant it!

1 comment:

Frog's hair said...

I am writing from Totus Tuus training so the quotation and your reflections on it are very apt. I will share them with the missionaries in training here.

The big question, of course, is when are we not missionaries? It shouldn't really ever end, whether we are evangelizing a campus, a parish, or a home. The life we live is not really our own. We live only to give ourselves away. Never to take. All is pretty easy if we remember that.