It is one thing to prepare to go overseas by learning approaches for loving the people and bringing them to Jesus. It is yet another thing to be there, in their midst, struggling to survive, tasting their plights, paralyzed and overwhelmed with their needs and with your own limits. I found that the Spirit of Jesus knew that is what I would experience and was there ready to counsel me the moment I would bend my ear to him.
We arrived in the capital city of our host country with a 22-month-old daughter and a six-week-old son, both in diapers. After six weeks of language orientation, we flew to the city we had felt led to and headed to an apartment which a contact had kindly located for our family. She said it was one of the nicer ones that could be found. The rent was a whole $15 a month! After living five weeks in a “spartan” university dorm with the only bathing facilities being downstairs in the dingy basement of the building, I was looking forward to this “nicer” apartment. I looked forward to having our own space, a place to give my babies baths, a place to wash their diapers and give them a clean environment.
As we moved in, what we found threw me back. Dirty wallpaper peeled off the walls, an unknown white powder lay sprinkled around the circumference of every floor to kill bugs, the balcony shelves overflowed with medicinal bottles of liquids and powders of all kinds labelled in an unknown language. I envisioned my children, both under the age of two, getting into all these interesting substances. I mopped up the white powder as soon as I had a chance.
I was relieved to see at least a manual washing machine sitting in the bathroom. It was the kind into which one would pour buckets of heated water and laundry detergent, turn it on to swish the clothes, drain the dirty water through a hose into the bathtub, and refill again as many times as needed to rinse. Even though there was manual effort required, it would be a big help with two kids in cloth diapers. We lifted the lid to glance at the inside conditions, only to find it was stuffed with old shoe soles! Concluding it probably didn’t work after all, my hopes were dashed. As our colleague fed us a delicious meal she had prepared for our arrival and left us to settle, I girded up my inner person, spoke reassuringly to myself, calming the alarm inside of me. And so, we began to settle into that little apartment. It would become a home-base for us and our team while each team member or family found a host family to live with for a season.
Our goals for our first years were to invest in prayer and language and culture learning. We aimed to have developed a hundred contacts, ten of whom we could consider our friends. To accomplish these, our first step was to locate a family to live with for a few months in order to immerse ourselves in language and culture close- up. My husband asked around at the university where he and the other singles on our team were enrolled. The university gave the privilege of hosting Americans for $10/month to university professors’ families. Within a couple of weeks of arrival, we were given the opportunity to move into a situation where the mother and father both worked daily, and the only child, a 12-year-old daughter, seemed to feel we had invaded her kingdom! Although we kept our apartment as a Sabbath and team retreat place, we moved in to share life with this Central Asian family.
Within a few days it was explained to me that the husband and sometimes students come over for lunch each day, and since everyone else was at work, I should be the one to cook. They were surprised to learn I didn’t know their ways to sort and clean rice, nor chop their vegetables, greens, and meats. How could I not know how to cook the most common dishes?! I wasn’t starting off as someone they might look up to for guidance and wisdom! Instead, I was a surprising dummy.
I felt the constant pressure to keep my baby and toddler quiet and away from the 12-year olds’ realm. The house was two stories, and we were given a single room upstairs, just across from “queen” 12-year-old. The only bathroom was downstairs, where a washing machine like the one in our apartment sat. But it didn’t work. That meant washing up to 20 cloth diapers at a time, all by hand.
We hadn’t been there for three weeks before early winter hit us, and we realized the second floor of the house had no way of being heated. Thirteen inches of snow fell one night. The professor had done what every neighbor did, installing a temporary wood burning iron stove downstairs with exhaust being directed out of a metal pipe through a pane in one of the nearby windows. Upstairs, our room was freezing; my little ones lived and slept in their Colorado-purchased snow suits. Drying cloth diapers was a huge issue.
One day, I hit a wall. We’d probably only been there a few weeks, but I was done. I was exhausted, frustrated at my babies for waking each other constantly, aware of feeling alone and out of place, overwhelmed by the expectations on me. After finally getting to the unreached, I found myself even complaining and blaming my husband for bringing me to this place!
At that point, I picked up my crying 2-month-old to walk him to sleep. I wasn’t trying to listen to God, I wasn’t really thinking about it; I was thinking about what I’d say to my husband! But my Shepherd was apparently thinking about talking to me. Tears streaming down my face as I walked, I glanced out a window into the empty plot next door, now laden with a foot of snow. A plume of smoke caught my eye, and then a sight that stopped me in my tracks. There, in front of an open door to a metal shipping container outfitted to be a temporary home, standing in a foot of snow, was a woman pouring warm steaming water over her husband’s head as he washed it over the snow. Smoke drifted out from the metal pipe welded to the roof of the container. The woman wore a thin dress over warm leggings and had wrapped a brown woolen shawl over her shoulders, overlapped in the front and then tied in the back of her body to keep her warm. In the open door, two small children stood watching, and happily chattering with one another.
In only a glance I compared my situation with hers and felt a gentle rebuke. As my eyes took it all in, I thought of this woman’s life—raising her family in a metal container, in freezing cold temperatures this week, probably spending most of her life laboring to care for and feed this little family. What was I crying about! Thoughts flooded my mind. How many women in the world live more like she lives than like I’m used to living or like I’m wishing I could be living right now? A statistic came to my mind that I’d heard not long before: 85% of the world’s women live in situations where their lives are spent in labor on behalf of their family; only 15% of the world’s women have a choice to live in relative ease with appliances to aid their housework. The question arose as to how I am to reach people like these. The initial thought within me was to change their living situation to be easier, but that didn't feel like the core solution. At that point I became aware of my Companion and asked him the question of how I would minister to these people. The sense I immediately received was: I’ve not called you to change the way these people function and live in order to enjoy life; I’ve not called you to bring them into your world and the way you have thought life should be; I’ve called you to take me into their world, that they might know the joy of Jesus in the midst of all their life situations.

85% of the world’s women live in situations where their lives are spent in labor on behalf of their family; only 15% of the world’s women have a choice to live in relative ease with appliances to aid their housework.

The question for me was whether I would be willing to enter the lifestyles of the 85% in order to reach them. Somehow it all put my life back into perspective again. My response to the Shepherd was a broken and humble “Yes”, along with acknowledging that I would need him to help me do so: O God free me from my preconceptions, my expectations and comparisons with how things should be; forgive me for complaining. Help me to walk in gratefulness. Change me, teach me to accept these people and adjust and reach into their lives that they might know you and your joy and may pass it on to others like a grassfire leaping from one to another.
My tears and complaints were gone. I was humbled, repentant of my frustration and discontent; I thanked God for his still small voice and perspective that invaded my misery, that quietly caught my attention and changed my perspective. Jesus, I so need this ministry of your still small voice; thank you that you sent the Spirit to be with us and in us.
“The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.” (Isaiah 58:11)

You can find When Serving Gets Tough at William Carey Publishing.