Asking God for More

In the long shadows of late Sabbath afternoons, we would often visit Mabel.

She lived alone in a house too big for one person, consolidating her living on the lower floor where the woodstove’s warmth held back the February chill. A favorite chair; a favorite shawl; a stack of books on every table; her Bible always within reach.

And stories—always stories—of long-ago evangelistic campaigns; of Bible study interests visited; of families coming back to faith through patience and persistence. For more than 40 years, Mabel had been a Bible worker in a small conference, crisscrossing the territory through dozens of public campaigns, through deep snow every winter and humid heat in summer.

But the “brethren” had retired her at age 65, seeing a chance to trim personnel expenses. Hurt by the fact that she could no longer do the work to which she had given her entire adult life, she retreated to the old house 200 miles from where she wished to be. She threw herself into the life of a nearby congregation, teaching the weekly Sabbath School, hosting potlucks at her house, calling church members by phone when roads were deep with springtime mud.

Her mind was always on her mission, though, even in those moments when you thought the topic had turned to gardening or cars. Her old Dodge might take her places the rest of the year, but it served its truest purpose if it carried her those 200 miles to camp meeting each June, the two weeks when she went back to volunteer among the dozens—hundreds—she had brought to faith. The garden crops were planted so as not to mature during that critical fortnight when nothing else mattered so much as seeing how big the children had grown; how folks were settling into faith; how families were choosing Adventist education.

For Mabel, there was no such thing as part-time mission or occasional involvement. Her eyes lit up, her voice might break, when she would speak of Jesus. In between the stories of long-ago evangelists and storms survived and lonely years, her thought seemed always bending toward the task to which the Lord had summoned her. There was a sweet ferocity in Mabel’s single-minded focus: it made you check yourself and examine your commitments.

Though all help will be welcome, the mission to which Jesus calls this end-time people asks more than just our surplus time and energy. It asks for consecration even when our hands are full of other tasks. The “mind of Christ” never settles for “good enough”: it’s never satisfied with the 99 who “safely lay in the shelter of the fold.” If grace has found a home in us, we search, we pray, we work, we travel, to share the joy that is still changing us.

Just like Mabel.
The church I want to belong to is . . . mission-minded.