Entering the Land of Missionaries

Missionaries are an interesting and unique breed of people. I have very much enjoyed spending time with the missionaries I have met during my meals at BMS. Margarete is one who brings with her the imagination of the missionaries of 100 years ago (but with a theology of contemporary pluralism). Perhaps it is simply because she speaks with her lovely British accent and knows India so well, but nevertheless I feel like I'm entering a lost world of missionary grandeur when we eat together in the evenings. I think about my mother as a woman roughly my age becoming a member of the Congolese Christian community, an identity that has never left her heart in these thirty years since her time there, and I think I have a new understanding of what that time meant in her life. Missionaries have a faithfulness about them, like that which I have only ever seen in the Rev. Mother in "The Sound of Music" or the Jesuit priests in "The Mission". This is not a film, however, these are real people who have given up a comfortable Western life to be God's instruments of love and hope in the places that imperialism and, now, capitalism have left behind and forgotten. I feel very blessed to know the missionaries I have met. There are none other on earth the same as they.