Have you met the interns yet? They're pretty amazing. The following post is from Becca Pugh, our happy-go-lucky intern from Pittsburgh.
For me, being missional has come to mean loving each person I encounter as if that person is a beloved child of God, whether or not they believe in Him. It means treating every moment as an opportunity to share the love and grace that God freely gives me each day with someone who desperately needs it (and there isn’t one person who doesn’t desperately need it). I’m definitely not always good at being missional, but this has been my perspective. The moments when I live out that idea are when I am most aware of God’s presence in my life and the potential for His presence in the lives of those I am reaching out to.
Being missional also means proclaiming where you are, and proclaiming to people around the world who may not have the chance to hear about the story of Jesus unless someone goes and tells them.
In high school, I only understood being missional in the context of short-term mission trips with my youth group. There is a lot of value in the short-term trips I went on, because they opened me up to the possibilities of life in God’s kingdom. It was only on these trips that I really saw how the word of God could come to life through my service and my interactions with people. The team and I weren’t just on a service trip, but we were being the hands and feet of Jesus. I felt so alive as I lived out God’s purposes on those trips. The only problem was that I wasn’t living out the word of God in my daily life back home. I didn’t understand how the experiences I had on that trip could translate to my daily life, in which I interacted with the same people every day- family, friends at school, classmates, and my track and field team.
My pattern of life at home was so different from the way I lived on those mission trips, so it was challenging for me to figure out how to not only share my experiences with the people I care about, but also live my life in such a way that I was loving and serving people with the same kind of passion.
Sometimes I think it’s difficult to translate what we view as “missions” to our everyday lives because the ways we are missional on a mission trip look different from how we might be missional in our typical everyday lives. Pastor Mark Batterson of National Community Church says that we should always do what we can with what we have where we are. So in being missional, we should do just that- wherever I am, how am I using what God has given me to reach out and invite others into community and the love of Christ? Am I doing all that I can and asking God to use it for His will and His glory?
Being missional is continually sharing your story, who Jesus is to you and what He has done in your life with those you are in relationship with and even complete strangers when God presents the opportunity. In order for God to use me, I have to be willing and I even have to be seeking those opportunities.
When you hear the term "missional", what do you think about? How have you learned to share your story with others? We'd love to hear about it in the Comments below.
