I Don’t Have Any Idea What I’m Doing.
Sitting here at my office desk, performing the mundane tasks of Monday, I find myself wondering,
“Did that really happen?”
I’ve refilled my coffee six times already and it’s not even noon.
I was up before 4 am, washing my kitchen floor, and singing.
Jet lag has me in a chokehold.
Just a few days ago we were on the other side of the world, experiencing another side of our Great God, and all of it now feels like a blur of memory.
It did happen.
It really did.
Isaac, sharing the Gospel
“You warned me about the cost of missions,” Isaac, one of our Next Gen missionaries spoke to me through red and watery eyes. The Gobi desert wind had blown his wavy hair into a mess, and missions had ruined him. It was obvious.
“I listened to you, and I believed what you said. I counted the cost of discomfort, leaving family, the humility of raising funds, but you didn’t tell me about this part, the hardest part. You didn’t mention what it was going to be like to say goodbye to a people and a place you decided to give your heart to.”
His words echo in my head, reverberate through my heart.
Yes, Isaac it’s true. That’s the part I never quite dealt with myself.
Missions had ruined me, and it too, was obvious.
I had wept through my few days in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, our first stopping point before we reached our true destination in the South Gobi, which for the sake of the protection of our mission, I’ll simply call it, the village.
UB, as it is affectionately referred to, is more than just the coldest capital city in the world. It was home to me and my family for eight beautiful years. It was my first mission field, where I failed and succeeded sometimes simultaneously in ministry. It was where I gave my whole heart to the people in my sphere of influence. I left seven years ago and strategically chose to never look back. Upon my return it became apparent to me that although it was a strategic decision, it was not in the least a wise one. I was confronted for a few days with the scattered pieces of my heart I had left behind, collecting them as I visited the place where God had called me to in 2007. It was impossible to hide my anguish and joy regardless of how much I desired to do so in front of this group of next generation missionaries that I had brought along with me.
I wanted to cry out over and over again… “watch me, and never do it this way.”
Tourist again 2024
“Shari,” my mom had said on her deathbed eleven years ago.
“If I had to do life over again I would never make the mistakes I made.” And after a long pause she added, “I would make all new ones.”
Her words caused me to smile all these years later.
How much I would love to avoid failure and harm on the mission field. How eager I was to get it right, to not destroy or leave too much of myself with others. “Jesus, only Jesus,” we say as if we can avoid ourselves in the equation. Jesus, in us, yes, but it is still, us. The unmistakable miracle of missions is that Jesus uses humans when He doesn’t have to.
He invites us, includes us and moves through us.
Some of us are never able to come to terms with that. We work so hard to be enough, to get it perfect because we fail to surrender to the absurd plan of God.
It’s exhausting to do God’s work for Him because we were never meant to.
We were created to participate with Him, to join Him where He is working, to learn through group action, His people in action, to watch Him and imitate Him all while we are very much still…us.
After I had wiped up any remnants of pride that managed to remain after spending the long days in UB with our seven wide eyed future missionaries, our CCWM Missions Development Director, Jennie and Evangelist, Mike (I’ve left last names out for protection of future missions), I wondered if this was the front end of our Mongolia journey, what would the next leg look like when we launched into our intended mission?
We drove the twelve hours to the South Gobi Capital of Dalanzadgad, leaving the city life and entering into the nomadic world of Mongolia. Staying two nights in the South Gobi capital before we would head into the true desert, driving five hours, mostly off road to the village.
Our hotel in the South Gobi Capital City of Dalanzadgad.
The night before we left for the desert, I stayed up in my bed praying, reflecting.
I wrote.
“I wonder if all great stories begin with, I didn’t know what I was doing?
All of mine do.
This one is no exception.
I have found myself, this day, in a stranger predicament that I believe I have ever been in, and I have certainly been in a few very strange stories.
I journal from a pathetic excuse for a hotel, complete with holes punched into the door, filthy bathrooms and an ashtray that assumes this hotel is not usually used to house future missionaries, and old ones like me.
This is not my final destination. Instead, my final destination which it has taken me now six full days of travel to achieve, is a small, south Gobi village without a church.
Late last year, the Lord moved on my heart to be concerned for this village. This indeed is strange. In fact, I had many other concerns at the time.
Yet God, mentioned it to me, to be concerned for this village.
I have known God for all my life. He is not only my Savior, my Father, my Lord, He is also interesting to me. What He does is of great interest to my stubborn and rebellious and broken heart. I like to follow Him around. It would seem He was working in this small village and even more so, He was inviting me to come and see what He was doing.
Normally, I would have moved past this thought, distracted by life around me.
But for some reason that day, I did not.
Instead, I began thinking deeper until thinking turned into planning, and crazier still, inviting others.
Twenty-one others to be exact. Who all said yes.
But not just any others. These are a group of seven Next Generation Missionaries, and their leaders with heart ablaze for Jesus and deep love and commitment to the Gospel, and Mongolians who love their county fiercely and want to see God work here and two long term missionaries in the trenches.
Hence, my fear, my doubt, my feeling of uncertainty about what I have talked them into.
Last week we spent revisiting my life in Mongolia. My old life, and I was able to at last put it to rest, to lay it down. The process was painful, as if I had undergone surgery of the depth of my soul. I have not ached in spirit the way I did these last six days, the whole time trying desperately to put to words what happened here while these wide eyed, sometimes exhausted and disinterested people followed me around from memory to memory. But these memories they were not just of me or my family. They were memories of Jesus and how he worked. Some may visit the Holy Land to see where Jesus walked, but me, I was visiting the old Mongolia, the streets where I lived, the places I walked with Jesus. It was as if I were a ghost now, walking along side those memories willing deeply that all who were there around me could see it like I could. But of course, they could not. Instead they saw old abandoned homes, run down with paint faded to almost nothing. The bright blue of our life turned to grey.
It was hard.
And good.
And right.
All of this leading to now.
Today, as we prayed as a group, as my insides quaked wondering what on earth I was thinking to bring a team to the south Gobi with a plan to plant a church? What if I fail them? What if I let them down? What if nothing happens beyond us showing up and feeling awkward?
And as these thoughts swirled etching creases into my forehead the Lord spoke to me.
“I am doing a new thing and you are part of it.”
These words. They were unexpected and so kind. You are part of it Shari.
If I stayed home, or perhaps more wisely stayed at the thought of concern for the village and not made all the plans, preparations and invitations, all that would be left here for me is the old thing.
But thanks be to God who is able to do far above, exceedingly abundantly greater than we could ever hope or imagine, there is a new thing here for me.
I don’t have any idea what I’m doing.”
Our Mongolia home 2024
Our Mongolia Home 2010
The next morning, we began the first of many spiritual battles and miracles with one of our team members needing emergency hospitalization for a rare and chronic illness that had not flared up for him in many years. As he drove off to the hospital, with our bus awaiting our departure to the Gobi I texted my husband Troy.
“I don’t think I’m going to make it to the village. I may need to go back to UB to get our tickets changed due to this emergency.”
To which he faithfully responded, “You have no other option but to go to the village. This is what you’ve been waiting for, praying for.”
I laughed a bit at his persistence but then Q, one of the long term missionaries and I had the idea to gather the team and pray. We all met in the hotel room to seek God’s help for our team mate, and God answered. The doctor on call at the small hospital just so happened to be the one doctor in the entire country of Mongolia who was well educated in this rare illness. She wasn’t even supposed to be there that morning, but took a shift for her colleague. It was our first miracle.
We boarded the bus to the village in faith that the rest of the team, waiting at the hospital would catch up to us. As Troy put it, we knew we had no other option.
Our second miracle was a lunch provided for us by a small church just two hours north of the village. We disembarked the bus and headed into a small log cabin where we were gifted a banquet style table decorated in red, white and blue! The food was glorious. Fried chicken, salad, soft drinks, and a seat for each of us.
“I googled what Americans eat!” Our hostess shared. “I hope you like it and I hope it feels like home to you.”
We could not believe her kindness and the love we felt from this small church who had been praying for us during our six month preparation to come.
As we ate I thought of the scripture from the twenty-third Psalm, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” Here, we were eating a meal that was being prepared for us back when we were on our knees in the hotel room begging God for a miracle for our sick team mate. Our enemy was plotting to take us off mission while God was providing provision for us. How lovely to consider a God outside of time, working for us when we are unable. Our hostess began to share her testimony with us and it was then we learned that she had been one of the recipients of our food distribution services back in UB. All those years ago she had received food from Flourishing Future, the organization my husband Troy had directed, and now she was serving us our food. Both of us were in shock when we learned about it. Only God could bring it all together in this way. By the time we finished our meal, the second half of our team walked through the log cabin doors. All of them. We were headed to the village together. The small church prayed over us sending us to the small village they too were concerned for.
Our team with the small church in Bayan Tseg
The final few hours into the desert I was alert, finally over myself, willing now to see it clearly. It was not about me. I had no fear of leading anyone the wrong direction… because we were following close on the heels of the God of all time, the one who was and is and is to come.
Our big yellow bus, a ridiculous spectacle in the Gobi.
As the sun began to set we found ourselves at the edge of the town we had only held in our imagination. In that imagination we had stopped at the edge of the town to pray before we went in, but I had not voiced this to anyone. Fortunately, the Spirit of God, who had given me the idea, also gave it to M, the woman who had helped us gain access to the village. The big yellow bus stopped a few miles out of the village and we all stepped off in awe. We were here. It had taken 18 hours on a plane, four days to regroup, seventeen hours on a bus to accomplish it.
Our shadows with the small village in the distance.
“This is why the unreached are unreached.”
Jennie said with the sun casting a golden glow all over us and the small village in the distance.
“They are sometimes just literally that hard to get to!”
She said with a smile.
After we took a moment to catch our breath we all joined hands and gave thanks. God had brought us this far. We acknowledged our smallness and our uselessness with out Him. We readied ourself for whatever was set before us and we rejoiced together. Later, we would pray at the village gate asking God to make His name known there. All for His name sake.
When we finally drove into the village we were overcome with the greatest, most tangible sense of peace I have ever experienced in my life. It was such a peculiar peace that I imagine it was the type of peace I would receive in Heaven alone. All of the team commented on the peace and overwhelming joy they felt and we marveled at our third miracle. He was with us. Already here to greet us as we arrived. We were a spectacle in the big yellow bus, for all to see. The first foreigners to ever visit the village. Well aware of how wrong we could get it,
“ Lord,” I prayed,
“let us do it well for your name sake. Please.”
I desperately wanted to please the long term missionaries who had come with us to serve, Q & T and M, the woman who had made a way for us to come here. This was indeed her home town. All three of them had trusted me and my crazy plan. They had worked very had to set everything up, and once again I took on the burden of wanting to meet expectations. This is how my life in missions has often gone, slipping in and out of total trust and surrender to complete terror and need for control. God has always stayed with me on my slippery slope, pulling me gently back to safety spaces.
This time would be no exception. God would challenge me with the new thing he had planned for the village.
In my past ministry I was opposed to many things.
I’m not proud of all that I was opposed to, but I do feel it necessary to expose it.
I was somewhat opposed to short term evangelism missions because I had noted the many times people had said to me, “I tried Christianity, I prayed with someone once but nothing changed.” They had simply said a prayer with someone passing through, with no discipleship offered to them, they had nowhere else to go. It frustrated me.
I was opposed to teams coming from far away and storming through the community as if they had some spiritual permission to be there when I was in the trenches long term every single day, dealing with the long term burden of the suffering poor.
I was opposed to evangelism without a long term discipleship plan.
I was opposed to those short term mission teams who did not have a plan but instead intended to “wait on the spirit of God to lead them.” I specifically remember feeling the aggravation of their lack of schedule and purpose and wondering why the Spirit of God could not have spoken to them in their preparation for the trip…why wait until you’re here? God is outside of our timeline anyway!
And now, as if to humble me further, face in the ground. I had become the team, the methodology and the disorganized mission that I had so greatly opposed. The Lord was clear with me from the beginning that this would be an evangelism mission. We weren’t to bring anything to this village but the Gospel. Although we longed for a plan, He never gave it to us, only to wait and to pray and to see what He would do.
This was the most uncomfortable mission I could have ever imagined for the above reasons. I was forced to be the one I had judged.
I can see God working in this, and changing my heart. It was humbling to not have the answers people wanted, worse to understand fully the skeptical look in their eyes because it was an image of my former self looking back at me.
I didn’t know who would lead the church we hoped to ignite into action. I had no discipleship plan. I had no one to stay and do the work. We were going to leave them with whatever we were able to give them in four days.
Uncomfortable answers for the wise. I felt for the receivers of my answers, I knew what they were burdened with and the judgment towards me was familiar and understandable.
It was hard.
Our first day in the village, we chose to meet in the city square for open mic night. We had permission from the local government before we arrived.
To say that all of the town was waiting for us would be an understatement. However, only the children were brave enough to come forward. They filled the square and we sang, danced and made bracelets, utilizing our amazing translators and google translate to communicate together in the evening hours.
Everyone had one question. “Why did you come here?”
And we had but one answer. “The God who created the mountain you worship, who created all things, told us about you and asked us to come and introduce you to Him.”
Saying this was as bizarre as it sounds to read it.
Yet it was the absolute reason we had come to Mongolia.
“Are we the only town you are coming to?” Was often the follow up question.
When we would tell them yes, they could not believe it. They seemed to hang on every word we said. They listened intently and shared about their lives. It was obvious to us, the Lord was here working to prepare the way and soften their hearts.
I texted T, my former ministry partner and the most powerful Mongolian woman of God I know, “Let’s have church tomorrow in the old ger where they once held services… I want to invite the people. Pray about who will preach.”
T replied with a laughing emoji telling me, “It’s as if you and M are on the same page! She texted me almost the exact message except she added, “Shari will preach.”
The Nxt Gen missionaries were so well received it was as if I were a shadow following them through their mission field. The teenagers and children of the village were drawn to them and they were almost glowing with God’s love, presence and power. We began to invite them to come to what they called “The Jesus House” the next day. This was a small ger with a wooden cross which had at one time served as a local church. There had been three people attending church, and three church leaders. Two of the leaders had died of cancer and one had gone corrupt. The ger had been cleaned up and prepared for us. It is what I felt the Lord had brought us here for, to ignite the small remaining nominal believers into action. I prayed all night.
The next day, walking into that small church felt like a dream. I had envisioned it for so long. Now I was here. After last night’s outreach I was prepared for the whole town to come. But instead we received about twenty, mostly children with some teenagers. My heart felt sad for but a moment, when God reminded me, “Shari, I am doing a new thing.”
I thought of Jesus’s words, “Don’t keep the children away…Bring them to me. The Kingdom of God belongs TO THEM.”
Then the three Christians came. I could not believe it was them. I wanted to jump across the ger and hug them, hold them, speak words of courage to them. However, their stoic faces reminded me I was in reality, not my dream version of this mission. They were skeptical, quiet and reserved.
Reko, a former ministry partner in UB, played the guitar and began to worship in Mongolian. I couldn’t help but consider how much this pleased the Lord to be worshiped here in this town. We all sang, and felt the weight of the moment equally. There with the sweltering heat filling the ger, I shared my message with the three Christians. Through tears I told them why I had come and what God desired to do with their small village. Their faces never moved, they didn’t smile; in fact, I wondered many times if they understood anything I was saying. After I had unloaded my burden to them, I shared the gospel message and invited everyone to receive Christ. Not a single person responded. I waited in silence while the team prayed.
“Lord, I know you are concerned for this village, I know you have told me you would be here and they would surrender to you. I know you are doing a new thing.”
Payton, a Next Gen missionary, spoke up. “Shari, you forgot to tell them about eternal life.”
By now, my pride had been smashed into a subdued clay and I more than appreciated the reminder. Although I had heard T speak of eternal life in Mongolian, I had not said it myself.
Mike then stood and added words that seemed to penetrate the group’s heart. When he gave the invitation to receive the gift of salvation, they all stood.
The Next Gen missionaries and the Mongolian team paired up, gathering in groups of three or four outside to disciple and pray and present them with Bibles. Bibles, I had forgotten to bring even a single Bible in Mongolian or any follow-up discipleship materials. In the months leading to this mission, I had been so sick, and focusing mainly on my health and my ability to even get here. I was as ill prepared as anyone could be. Yet God had provided M with all we needed before we arrived. She had brought the Bibles with her, T had brought discipleship follow-up materials and devotionals. Thank you Jesus! It takes a village to reach a village.
Nxt Gen showed the new believers how to download the Mongolian Bible on their phones and directed them to Youtube channels and other resources in Mongolian.
The new thing God was doing was with teenagers and children. It surprised me, maybe all of us.
With everyone outside now, I made my way to the three. I asked them for feedback and it was then I realized, how much they had understood. All of it. They cried, and shared their burden with me. One had lost her way, returning to Shamanism. The other had gone silent, alone in her faith, recently praying, “God do you even see me?” The third had felt so unqualified to even talk to God anymore after he had wandered so far away. None of them felt at all capable of leading the new church. They would not take my challenge to begin meeting here in this ger at least once a week. Instead, they chose to gather the three of them together for the next fifteen weeks to do the Bible study T had brought with her. I began to see this as God’s plan and a better plan than I had envisioned. It was not what I hoped for, but it was likely the longer term solution. We prayed together and I wondered what a spectacle I must appear to them as. This blonde haired, crying woman from America who is burdened with their church. I wondered if they believed me, If they understood the urgency I felt. They were so hard to read.
Tuvsho and I sharing our message with the three previous Christians.
As we left church that day of us rejoiced and felt a sense of being a part of something so much bigger than we were capable of. We knew God was there and we wondered what He would do next.
Throughout the week we were left unmonitored by most of the officials. When I did finally meet the mayor she said, “Last week I had time to meet with you, and next week I will as well but this week I have been unable to.”
Because of this we had permission and freedom to share our faith with anyone who came to hear it, both children and adults. It was as if the grace of God was surrounding us at all times, even through spiritual attack. Many of us were awakened on nights two and three by nightmares, voices whispering in our ear, darkness and evil surrounding us, and yet we were not given to fear. Instead, we recognized it as the spiritual attack that it was and persevered through prayer. I was learning form the next generation of missionaries, how beautiful it was to view the mission as God’s mission which we are simply partnering with Him in. The pressure was off, the weight was light and the joy was there.
Other attacks came from within, disagreements that were familiar, about methodology. M, our beautiful host, was often disappointed because we were not the strong Korean style team she had spent years praying for, instead we were a group of youth, quite free in our faith and without much power. I tried to reassure her that God was moving, God was doing a new thing and she too seemed to grasp this although it confused her.
I tell you all of this because, it is the true story of the mission field. If we leave out the painful side we eliminate much of the miracle, because despite all of it God was glorified in this tiny little town in the South Gobi, and many came to Him for the very first time.
The Next Generation of missionaries bonded well with their Mongolian team mates and together, on our last day they decided to present the full Gospel in the village square through a skit about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. They got to work mid-morning and toiled most of the day on their presentation.
Just at golden hour, our group presented the Gospel story in such a way that silence fell across the crowd. Everyone, deeply involved in the story of Jesus. When He did miracles, a child shouted, “Jesus can do anything” and when Jesus died another one called out, “He did nothing wrong!” When Jesus resurrected the entire crowd cheered.
Jesus resurrecting from the grave!
Later, as we broke into smaller groups for further discussion three teenage girls received Christ. While the team was praying with them, one of them became very ill and almost fainted. She fell to the ground. One of our Mongolian team mates, Anujin, a new believer herself, recognized this as spiritual attack and she calmly said to the village people around her, “This is a spiritual attack because we have an enemy satan, who does not want your village people to know Jesus. Please watch what I do because we will be gone in just a day from now and you will need to know what to do when this happens again.” She proceeded to quietly pray in the name of Jesus for deliverance and then she began to quote scripture, “I’m quoting from the Bible, the word of God, it is what Jesus did when he was attacked by Satan and so we can do it too, and God will deliver us.” As she read Psalm 91 the sick girl began to get better and stood up to receive Christ, thanking Anujin for praying her through.
That evening after several had prayed to surrender their life to Christ and received some basic next steps, we began to say our goodbyes, but many of them began to cry. “We don’t want to say goodbye to you,” they told us, “You have given us so much.”
Knowing what we had given them was the Gospel, it was true—we had given them everything.
In the days to follow, as we left the village we received texts from the new believers with questions about their Bible reading and comments about what they were learning. It was a great surprise and joy to our team to know they had done more than simply pray, they were taking it into their own hands and we prayed the Holy Spirit would do the work we were not able to do.
We left the village at the break of dawn both figuratively and literally.
“I have heard about the way God moved in history,” one Mongolian teammate told me. “But now I got to be a part of it.”
A next generation missionary said, “I have had to create all knew files to put the things that I have seen here.”
Indeed, our NXT Gen missionaries left the village as missionaries. It’s not about the future for them any longer. In real time, they were a part of reaching an unreached community. They did it. Not me.
For myself, as I drove out of the village, I couldn’t help but whisper two very basic words of praise, “Thank you.”
It will be a mystery to me forever, why God allowed me to do this. Perhaps it was for my own soul. Maybe it was to show me how He works as He wills, in ways beyond what I oppose, my offenses and preference.
But why me? The answer is simple. It had started with a prayer and a map. I was simply looking for Him and asking Him where He was working and where he might invite me to work with him. It was a dangerous prayer that I had no idea the ramifications of. I hope I am brave enough to pray it again. It may take me to a family member who needs love and care or across the street to a neighbor I need to pray with perhaps or to the other side of the world to an unreached community.
All is worth it.
