Going (Hazel) Nuts on the Mission Field

Tomorrow is our last day of mission work. Friday we travel to Chicago and Saturday we head home. Somehow the theme of smallness continues to be the keynote for me as I ponder this experience. "For who hath despised the day of small things?" the Lord asks (rhetorically, I presume) in Zechariah 4.10. Well, let me list a few of the things I am not despising so far:

1. Chit Maung, an eighty-six year-old Muslim man with whom I have had English lessons for the past three days. I say I've had the lessons with him rather than given them to him, because he firmly communicates that he is in charge and that we will learn what he considers important. We have not practiced set exchanges such as, "How are you?" and "I am fine." Instead, I have discovered that American women are big and loud, while Burmese women are small and quiet. I have also learned that Muslims do not eat alligators and (I think) that men and cows should not have sex. If they'd taken my grandfather and exiled him to Burma in his eightieth decade and given him Burmese lessons, he would have acted exactly like Chit Maung.

2. Juan. Or Won. He's a Burmese child so we assume it isn't the Hispanic version, but he tells us that it's his name every time we ask, and he answers to it. Anyway, this kid is four or five and goes through life like a heat-seeking missile. Yesterday he hurled himself at a ten-foot cyclone fence, scaled it like a spider monkey, hung by one hand and foot as he curveted out into space, then leapt into the ether and landed on all fours before scampering off to his next conquest. If you roll a hula hoop across the lawn he'll dive through it, roll and spring back up then look at you as if to ask, "What's next?"

3. Mo, a Burmese child from the predominantly Christian Karin tribe who, unlike his pals, is not innately good at climbing trees or at soccer. But he's taken a liking to me and today he learned to throw a football in a respectable spiral.

Is this what God sent me here to do? Because it isn't much. But I've been reading Julian of Norwich this week and was struck afresh with her account of the hazelnut. God showed Julian a hazelnut and told her that this tiny pod was, for all practical purposes, the entire created world, and that though it seemed - and in fact was - so frail that nearly anything could crush it, "it lasts and always will because God loves it."In this little thing," Julian muses, "I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God preserves it."

So with one day of hazelnut missionary work ahead, I look at my unimpressive list and remember: God made what I have done here, God loves it, and will somehow do eternal work through it. And I dare anyone to despise that.