God is doing in the world, it doesn’t matter anymore.
There’s an organization I started years ago. The website said something
about how we were saving a whole generation of Ugandans. At one point,
I had to ask myself why I felt like I needed to overstate what we were
doing. A whole generation? Really? I don’t think so. We had five hundred
kids in school out of a country of forty-four million. People like me who
overstate the good we’ve done usually do so because we’re looking for
validation. We’re ticket counters. I was making a big deal out of my
small acts of kindness. I didn’t have a bad or malicious intent, just a
confused one. People who are ticket counters are insecure about how
much God loves us, so we mistakenly try to quantify how much we love
Him back by offering Him success or accomplishments or status or titles.
Here’s the problem: these are just a bunch of tickets that mean nothing to
Him. He wants our hearts, not our help.
That same awkward website also said we were “serving the poorest of
the poor.” It sounded like I was stepping over poor people and calling
them posers while searching for the “poorest of the poor” so we could
help them instead. My insecurity had me sounding like it was nobler to
help the poorest of the poor, rather than just the merely poor. I’m sure
heaven grimaces every time I do things like this. What I had done was
make it about me, yet again, and our lives will never be about Jesus if we
keep making everything about ourselves.
If we’re going to change, we need to take some of the familiar words
describing what we’re doing and trade those words in for the ones Jesus
used. For instance, I’m usually serving people right up until I tell
everyone about how I’m serving everybody. When I do, I make it about
me. We don’t need to go on “mission trips” any longer. Jesus’ friends
never called them this. They knew love already had a name.
I’ve known some remarkable and courageous missionaries. Perhaps