Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

If not martyred is my reward in Heaven less? That’s the endpoint of a question I’ve been thinking about. The wife and I are currently reading a book called Radical. The point of the book the author (Platt) makes is that we are to let go of the American Dream and focus on giving everything for the sake of the Gospel. In reading it I feel like he is saying everybody should be involved with those who are least likely to hear the Gospel, oversees missions.


To what degree should we be involved. I’ve always heard that some are called to go and some to stay, pray and give. Have I put off going because of lack of courage? Should I have aggressively sought to go? Did I chicken out? Or is the reality that I would be a terrible missionary; near-sighted, asthmatic, to comfortable with my swamp-cooler, car and Lucille’s BBQ.

Platt puts forth a one year challenge part of which is to serve short term. Perhaps we just need to start incrementally. How much is my part and how much God’s part? Why do some feel the burden from the womb? What if I hate bugs and snakes?

Mid-life there are more issues to work through than if I had set my GPS to ‘missions’ from my youth. I trust that as we start moving God will start opening doors. Certainly God can provide his own version of a swamp cooler and everything can be BBQ’d (including me!). It comes back to Heavenly reward. Is Jesus worth everything? I’ve already died---that’s what it keeps coming back to, “Consider yourselves to be dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” That’s the starting point for the questions and I’ll move forward from there.