2 Complicated Things I Miss from America

Been doing some hiking recently. Taiwan is full of mountains waiting to be climbed!

As I move into my 4th consecutive year in Taiwan, getting into medium to early-long-term territory, the things that I miss from the US become more abstract, and sometimes more complicated. As an INTP (i.e. a very analytical personality), serving in the well-developed East Asian nation of Taiwan, I don't really care about this or that particular thing from the States (food, etc), or anything I could acquire by hopping on an airplane tomorrow. If I really missed them enough, I could get access to them one way or another, and I know awesome people who would send all sorts of things to me if I asked nicely.

As you will note below, what I miss at this point are not really specific tangible things, or places. It's almost misleading to say they are things I miss "from America," as they aren't particular to that nation per se but related to my life there before coming out to the mission field.

What I miss are certain aspects of life which are absent or changed when one's career is that of full-time cross-cultural missionary service, and which I know are not available to me so long as I follow this path. It's simply the way mission work goes, much of the time, but I have found that aside from helping people see some natural challenges of missionary life, thinking through these kinds of things often brings forth ideas of how to adapt more helpfully to this way of life. Also, there's that slight chance that someone else is in the same situation, and will be encouraged by the sharing.

So, here is a bit of unpacking of two complicated things I've found I miss over the longer-term.

1. The Feeling of Productivity

I have long felt that most people don't like being productive so much as feeling productive. Most people don't particularly like having to wake up on Monday and go to work, for example, but the morning ritual of dragging one's self out of bed, with the shower, the coffee, enduring morning traffic with morning news or talk radio or music or whatever, which plays itself out over years for millions of middle class Americans, has become a sort of de facto rite of passage. You know you are an adult because you wake up early like an adult, dress like an adult, get annoyed at traffic like an adult, and go to the office to do grown-up things. (This is more or less what many younger millennials only half-jokingly call "adulting.")

As more of a task-focused type than a people-person, in my time on the field I have realized that this feeling of productivity, of boxes checked and specific things accomplished, of doing what the world expects from a responsible adult, is more important to me than I'd realized. Though I'm an INTP who prefers to work via flow vs. a rigid schedule, and requires adequate time for contemplation/processing to stay mentally healthy, as an adult man with a fairly serious case of oldest-child syndrome, I feel responsible for everything I'm involved in and need that sense of accomplishment to not feel that I've wasted a day.

The question of whether a day has been productive or wasted in terms of ministry can be complicated, but in general our sense of ongoing productivity tends to come through "xiao chenggong", the "little successes." Small accomplishments and specific tasks done well which give one a sense of progressing towards a goal. (or better yet, measurable progress towards an impressively big yet humanly achievable goal)

It's tough to get that feeling on a church plant. There's no "going in to the office," as I do gospel-centric activities scattered across a Taiwanese city district (a room in the local community center this morning, the lobby of a local business HQ after lunch, my coworker's home in the evening, etc). It's a job for which sitting at a computer is often necessary, planning lessons, putting together presentations, etc, but there is never any clocking in or clocking out. Missions is a 24/7 job, not defined by specific locations or hours. You are never off the clock, there is no time divided between "work" and "my free time." Meeting with a non-believing friend to chat over coffee, spending the same amount of time in a missions school board meeting or leading a Bible study, are all part of the gospel work, and there is simply no system or scale by which one can rate them in terms of "kingdomliness."

So there is a sense in which I am unable to gauge how much I've accomplished in a day, because there isn't anything to compare against. Just having a class or activity go well doesn't mean much. It's good, but it's impossible to exactly what extent I've advanced the cause of the gospel here, or to what extent we've drawn closer to planting a church, when we can only do that when people respond to the gospel message, which is something we can't control. My passion is that Christ be glorified in Taiwan, whereas most people are either literally bowing to statues, have a sort of vague TED-Talk religion of personal goals and giving back to the world, or are simply focused on personal success and comfort. But we can't change hearts, only the Spirit can do that, so we're putting years of time and effort into something we're intrinsically incapable of accomplishing alone. If God doesn't move, we don't see any fruit from our efforts. As an incoming missionary, I thought this meant He definitely would move, but I have discovered in the past couple of years that God does not alter His pace to cater to a human need for a sense of progress. (He may or may not move, and where God moves one usually finds His servants hard at work, but there is no contract where He agrees to move in proportion to how hard we work.)

Breaking new ground for the gospel doesn't always look impressive, then, and sometimes its fruits are only seen in the harvesting that follows at some point much later, sometimes one or multiple generations later. It's like a business in which nearly all the profit is continually invested back into the business itself. Everything may be proceeding according to the business plan, and there may come a day of tearfully glorious success, when it is revealed to have all been worth it all along, but workers may or may not be willing to keep investing in the future profit when it can't be seen now. (Sadly, many missionaries have left Taiwan when fruit seemed too slow in coming, or simply nonexistent. It's a constant struggle to balance the idea that one will see God working visibly when one is in His will, with the fact that He yet often calls us to continue in faith when we can't see the visible signs we feel should be there, all in tension with the knowledge that He works according to His own timing. As Lewis reminds us in the last Narnia book, He's not a tame lion.)

We say we walk by faith, not by sight, but it's quite a challenge to work by faith, not by sight. I am committed to learning how to live and work in this way, and Lord willing, can disciple others to do the same. Humanly speaking, however, some days I do still wish I could clock out after a hard day's work accomplishing measurable goals of one kind or another, and feel that I'd earned some leisure time.

2. Resource-based Solutions

A. When hardware is lacking
America is almost ridiculously blessed with resources. You can throw "stuff" at a problem, equipment, money, etc. and accomplish huge tasks with efficient use of manpower. It's seriously great to live in an economy and society where you can have your own shed, garage, workshop, etc. filled with your own tools, not to mention owning the space necessary to store them. If people weren't burdened under national debt and quasi-socialist tax burdens, and enslaved by entertainment media, the American economy would be incomprehensibly strong. A lot of people could do what they do at their job in half the time, spend some of their pay to buy capital goods, and spend the other half actually producing things of value at their home.

In Taiwan, and pretty much anywhere else in the world I've visited, these kinds of personal resources are scarce. The society isn't wealthy enough for lots of random individual people to acquire and maintain a whole supply of tools in support of their individual interests. Instead those resources are possessed by the wider family or community, sometimes in a less satisfactory way. You don't have the wrench, but Uncle Chen works at a shop which has one you can borrow next week. In Taiwan, the average person in a city doesn't have much living space to spare for tools or anything else, let alone the extra money to put into time-consuming hobbies. (America is wealthy in ways it's hard to recognize unless one has lived abroad in various parts of the world, though that's beginning to change as the middle-class is systematically destroyed and all the extra money siphoned out of society.)

So that's the first half of the problem. Much of the world simply doesn't have the impressive hardware and resources widely available to Americans, so there isn't the option to simply swoop in with the right tools to get the job done quickly and move on to the next one. Specific example: Our summer campground is a very old facility that requires continual maintenance as things break. We can fix them, but it requires time spent away from ministry to do so, and people who actually know how to do the work decently well, who are few and far between and typically otherwise employed. It would be a fun task for many American men, who have a pickup-truck-load of tools just waiting for the right chance to be used, and pride themselves on knowing how to use them to good effect. As an engineer by trade, there are times when I really miss problems which can be solved simply by acquiring the right tools and possessing the know-how.

B. When Physical Resources Can't Help Much Anyway
More to the point, however, in the case of missions and really anywhere one can passionately demonstrate a worthwhile need, there are good, generous people who would love to provide those resources. They will give sacrificially, they will go to considerable lengths to make sure the work of the gospel (or of charity, etc) is not hampered by the relatively straightforward problem of a lack of funds, or resources which can be acquired by said funds.

But there is not really any hardware which can be thrown at the challenge of building gospel relationships in the dense concrete jungle of a Taiwanese urban community, where there is no open field to raise a tent or park some cars, barely even space for a cluster of people to stand outside and avoid cars and scooters passing by; where whatever is done is done in your home or someone else's or a restaurant, to which people must accept an invitation. (Our community center is by far the best public area for events in our vicinity, and there is lots of competition for booking rooms)

There is a sense in which a trip to construct an entire new church building from the foundation up is vanishingly simple compared to the task of trying to disciple a single local believer. I've run cranes and tied rebar and welded steel columns and poured concrete foundations and laid tile and run pipe and done all manner of things necessary for constructing new homes or churches. It's hard work, but at the end of the day, it's done, and you have something to look at and feel that great sense of satisfaction.

But working with people is an entirely different challenge, and one which simply can't be solved with a bunch of physical labor, hardware tools, and enough funds to cover the project. You need to speak the local language well, you need people to be willing to connect with you, you need time in your and their schedule to meet, you need them to be spiritually open, and to slowly build trust with people somewhat suspicious that you're being nice to them while appearing to get nothing out of it yourself, etc.

So when people ask "how can I help," it can be a little frustrating that I don't have a lot of answers. I would love to have some specific request ready like "we need funds for our well-digging project" or "we need help building an addition on our orphanage," etc, but none of those apply in our context. We don't "need" anything in the sense of physical resources, and even more funds don't necessarily translate into being able to do more, since we already lack the manpower to comprehensively follow up on the community outreach we're involved with now. A few very specific things could enhance our work, especially Chinese-language teaching aids with traditional characters (much of what is available is in simplified Chinese, what China uses).

But the majority of what must be done is a long, slow process of building bridges with people and establishing trust, to let them experience God's love and joy, and sustain a long-term burden for them, praying that they too can enter the kingdom and know Christ as we have come to know Him. We need more people to do more follow-up, to meet new people in our community and make friends and build relationships for the sake of the gospel, to open new doors and be a living witness shining in a still-dark place.

Basically, what we need is neither funds nor stuff, what we need is you--to come help in the work of being fishers of men.