I bumped into a friend recently that I haven't seen in quite awhile. Obligatory catch-up conversations started and one thing led to another before we came to the question about my friend thinking about what to do in the future, in particular what to study. This seems very ordinary but it turns out to be far more interesting than I had previously anticipated.
You see, my friend here is deciding between two lines of study that are fundamentally very different from each other and of course this friend of mine is interested in taking the plunge on both of these. The obvious question was which one to choose. Again this sounds very ordinary but the kicker was that my friend wanted to choose which would give her the most skills to eventually serve God in the mission field or something else with a mission-centred area. At first glance, one of the lines of study immediately became the first choice for obvious reasons and that was what my friend thought as well. Then I realized something is not quite right.
Basically, my friend is putting God in a box. That service in the mission field is almost entirely dependent on what sort of skills you have.
We cannot act as though that what we study or the skills that we acquire are the things that will be most beneficial and most likely to be considered when out in the mission field, though there is some merit in that. But it is not the be all and end all for entering a mission field or even serving for that matter. God has used many people in the past who didn't exactly have the necessary abilities but they carried out God's plan regardless. For example, Moses or David or most recently studying in church, Amos. So coming back to my friend, God will use people no matter what sort of skill you have as long as you are willing to occasionally step out of your skill set to serve God. So my advice was to not to worry about which skills you are going to get out of either of the courses but just be ready to serve with whatever you have. Who knows, you may be serving using a completely different skill set than you first started out with and yet God uses that for His purposes.
But wait, there's more.
Now think about the countless Asian Christian parents whose kids are going to university. Urging them to do something that will grant stability like engineering, accounting, medicine etc. that these are the skills that will be highly useful in the mission field. Not the arts, oh no. Because what good is it that you can analyze pre-war Cambodian society or perform textural analysis of 1940's film to the poor, remote and sometimes broken societies which most Christians commonly associate as the mission field? Doing this "kills" in two ways, one that doing what you love means nothing if you can't bring in the bacon and two, indirectly teaching them that God cannot use you if you don't have the right skills for the mission field. And as an added bonus, teaching them that the mission field is in some far away God-forsaken land with no clean running water and electricity. The first is just harsh from a parent to a child, the second is borderline wrong and the bonus is just a misconception.
God can easily use an arts major to do mighty things in the mission field as to the "choice skills" person. Make no mistake about that, He has always been doing so and will continue to do so in the future. The more important question to consider (rather than what skills should I have) is will I serve regardless of what I am trained in? So don't worry about petty things like this, all you have to do is to be prepared to be mobilized.
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This is the only right way to do this song. Still stuck in my head.
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