Where does our value come from?

Almost two years ago...

I sat in the tent with my two small girls.  It was pitch black except for the small flashlight in my hand.  Outside I could hear the song of the crickets and the occasional dry of a night bird.  The tent sat inside a thatched roof hut.  I could hear the sound of a church service in the distance.  Alex, and the rest of the out reach team, were there.

On this particular outreach, we happened to have a church service every evening, and my one and three year old just weren't up for that.  So we had just finished our evening shower, managing with an outdoor shower and a barrel of water in the dark.  The girls were dressed in their bedtime attire (just diapers) and we were well into our bedtime routine.  Each girl got slathered with anti-itch lotion, to combat that day's insect bites, and then a shirt became a make-shift fan as I sang a lullaby.  Singing and fanning, singing and fanning, praying they would go to sleep.  One of the girls drifted off easily, but the other woke up suddenly as her bites began to itch. 

Crying and scratching, she woke her sister.  So the fanning stopped, and I began to rub their legs to lessen the itch.  Waiting for them to finally fall asleep, I couldn't stop the question from presenting itself any longer, "why are we here?"

All the "real" ministry is going on over at the church, I thought.  When the girls are asleep, it will just be me and the dark tent.  During the day, keeping tabs on a busy one year old holds me back from participating in the ministry.  And frankly, I'm so tired at this point that I can't even have a meaningful conversation with our host.  It's all I can do to get through another day, taking little girls to outhouses, figuring out how to bath them, trying to keep them healthy, and safe.  I don't feel very spiritual, and I don't feel that I am contributing ANYTHING to this outreach.

Moments like this can bring into question our value, if we think that it is derived from what we do.  In a missionary organization like YWAM, it is all too easy to start focusing more on what we can accomplish than anything else. We start to calculate how valuable this new staff member will be for the ministry.  We lament another co-worker who "isn't pulling their weight".  We feel like there is so much to do, and God is depending on US to save the world by the end of next weekend.  And we secretly feel good about how dedicated we are and how we haven't taken a day off since last year.

So then when our season of life shifts, and suddenly we find ourselves mothers with little ones at home, our whole value system can fall apart. Suddenly we don't feel like we are contributing.  We haven't preached a sermon, and lead an outreach, or even sat through a church service for a long time.  We can't even remember what it was like when we had a whole hour carved out in our daily schedule for a quiet time. That sounds like an unreachable luxury now.

While I think there are many reasons that mothers can feel inadequate, I think that for those of us in missions, the over emphasis on GETTING STUFF DONE is a huge culprit.

I think all of us, whether you are a mom in missions, a missionary around moms, or anyone else who resonates with this, need to take a few steps back every once in a while and think about where we are deriving our value from.  How is that coming out in our comments and actions?  How is it causing us to judge others, or judge ourselves?

When I begin to struggle with this again, I remember this line from scripture...

"We set our hearts at rest in his presence..."