A guest post:
I’ve been excited reading Joy’s daily posts on missional
living. Unfortunately, life hasn’t
allowed my implementation to keep up with my excitement. I’m still on the first week of trying to get
a date on my calendar with my neighbor.
Maybe I’m not trying hard enough to live missionally. Or maybe I’m trying too hard.
I have lived missionally for so long that these days I find
it hard to be missional. For fifteen
years I church planted and coached church planters, living in three different
locations including two internationally.
The five years before that I was in seminary and raising support. Twenty years later my heart still beats for
the lost but it beats harder for the fresh priorities in my life of faith and
family. Of course, family and faith are
integrated into a missional lifestyle, but that’s another blog post.
Missional living means living portions of your life
imbalanced for a season. There will be
times and circumstances when you have to prioritize outreach events,
discipleship or a move to another community over everything else. If you do that too much, it’s called burn
out. If you don’t do it enough, you may
not be taking enough risks in life to be considered missional.
The danger in having lived missionally in the past is that I
can use it as an excuse to not live missionally in the present. “I’ve served God as a missionary” is a little
self-talk that I hear frequently within.
“You’ve done a lot in the past” allows me to overlook my neighbor in
need.
Since the past is in the past and the future is in the
future, we have to choose to live in the present. My priorities today are different than my
priorities in the past. These days my
relationships with my wife and boys are the most important things to me. The conflict between being missional and
maintaining other important aspects of my life is a daily tension with which I
have to trust God.
What’s important for all of us, regardless of our season of
life, is that we maintain a missional heartbeat. I see three keys to maintaining a missional
heartbeat:
- Be open to what God is doing around me. He may give me kingdom opportunities that are simple to take advantage of if I tweak my schedule or mindset.
- Force myself from time to time, by God’s grace, to do something meaningful for someone else, in a way that spreads God’s fame. This keeps me honest.
- Remember that God takes both a short-term and long-term view of my life. Long-term, he gives me grace to prioritize my days over the years if all I am doing glorifies him. Short-term, he expects me to obey his commands day by day.
Missional means turning your life upside down for
Christ. If you don’t experience some
serious pain, distorted priorities and unanswered questions along the way, you
may want to reconsider whether you are being missional.
Taking on mid-life with a coffee snob strategy, Brian enjoys basketball,
social media and nature. Brian lives in Orlando, Florida; calls
Denver, Colorado home; grew up in Indiana; and considers himself a world
citizen. Brian is married to a lovely wife and together they are raising three
wonderful young men and longing for their daughter in heaven. The
Stankich family has lived and worked previously in Macedonia and Egypt. Follow Brian's insightful and practical writings here.
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