My memories of Advent from my childhood involve being given Advent calendars with chocolates behind each of the little doors by my Catholic relatives and being terribly excited about opening each day’s little door. That is the extent of my exposure to Advent for nearly thirty years. Though I was raised in a strong, Christian home, we were Pentecostal and didn’t celebrate the Christian Year, except for the normal Christmas and Easter. As an adult, I simply didn’t think of it, because it wasn’t part of my culture.

Until two years ago, that is, when I read a short editorial about it in the Religion section of the Sunday paper, and suddenly Advent took on a great deal of significance. The very theological concept of it intrigued and excited me, because theological concepts do intrigue and excite me. My soul is enlivened when my mind is stimulated by some lovely theological idea, and the idea of Advent certainly did that. But it’s also become significant over the last two years because of the current situation I find myself in, a kind of perpetual Advent.

Advent is a state of waiting. It’s a short amount of time that symbolizes the whole history of the Jews waiting for their Messiah, the whole longing of creation for a Redeemer. This is the time where we sit back and wait as if we were old Anna and old Simeon (Luke 2:22-38), recognizing God’s promises that He is going to change everything for the better and yet not seeing how or when. The Jews waited for thousands of years, and we Christians join them during Advent in waiting for Christ, the Messiah, to be born and turn the world right-side-up again.

Advent is a state of liminality, and that is where I find myself these days. Liminality is a term used in anthropology to describe a state of in-between-ness, and I have in a way reframed it to my own context. To me it means the state of waiting between the promise and the fulfillment, the period of time that stretches out for seemingly eternity while you wait for something to happen. It’s Christmas Eve night when you were a child and couldn’t sleep all night for anticipation of the next day. It’s sitting in the hospital waiting to find out whether your loved one is going to make it or not. It’s the time of numbness between a death and the funeral, of waiting backstage for your cue to go on, so nervous you think you’ll throw up, of the hundreds of years between Isaiah prophesying that the virgin would conceive a son and name him God With Us and the time when Jesus was actually born. It’s Christians for the last two thousand years saying, “Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus” and not yet seeing it. It’s me, stuck between a call to missions and that undefined, tantalizing time in the future when I will be financially in the position to go do it.

Tantalizing, aggravating, frustrating…just waiting. Waiting and hoping. It’s a time for hope, this liminality, and for trust. Liminality gives us room to learn a quiet trust in our Father, who is not slow in keeping His promises. Isaiah, the prophet we quote most when it comes to Christmas, says, “You shall triumph by stillness and quiet; your victory shall come about through calm and confidence” (Isaiah 30:15, Jewish Publication Society version). We’ve been given promises by the God whose nature we trust; I’ve been given a call to missions by a God who has never broken faith with me. I think of this little piece of Hebrews, in between two verses: “Yet at present we do not see everything subject to him. But we see Jesus…” (Hebrews 2:8c-9a). We see what God has already done, and that gives us room to grow in faith, hoping for a promised future we cannot yet see.

I am in a state of liminality, and Advent reminds me to hope that more is coming.

I’ve just realized today what it is that turns me off to this sort of movement thing. It’s that “I Am Enough” thing. I am enough? I am enough for what? I am enough for me? I have everything I actually need? If I just dig down deep enough into my own inner soul I will find out that I am actually all I need, everything I need? I can fulfill myself? I have the strength and power within myself to do everything I need to do and face everything I need to face, and all I have to do is believe in myself?

I have spent my entire life being told I’m not good enough (mainly by my own brain), and I have spent my whole life trying desperately to prove that I am. I have never strayed from God. I have never done anything particularly bad. I am a responsible, pathologically polite person. I am very intelligent (probably not a genius, which is frustrating) and creative and quirky, and by George, I think I’m interesting. I like my own company, and I try very hard to never give offense to anybody under any circumstances and never to appear irresponsible or unable to do what I should be able to do. Criticism (especially constructive criticism) flays me alive, because it demonstrates that I am not as good and able and responsible as I should be. I am supposed to be enough for everything that is expected of me. After all, I am The Missionary. The Good Christian. The Intelligent and Rational Person. I have been Called. I have so much going for me. I should be enough.

I am not enough. Digging deep inside myself to find all those hidden reserves of magnificence and power and stuff, I have found that under the intelligence and capability and proper behavior and interesting, creative quirkiness is actually a very small, naked, frightened person who’s probably about 5 years old and has no idea what on earth she’s doing.

Someone has given this particular 5-year old a job, and that is raising $6,213.92 per month for 3 1/2 years. Doing so in a timely manner will prove that I am good enough to go do an even bigger job in Europe. I have applied to this job all the considerable resources I have, all the intelligence and responsibility and courtesy and analysis and new-found public-speaking ability and creativity and love of missions and new web development skills and writing skills and story-spinning ability and the story of my call and personal development and my emotionality and my rationality and my personal contacts and love of baking, and found…I am not enough.

Thank God for that.

Honestly. Having to prove that you are enough is so stressful. Always trying to be invincible and impermeable and infallible because that is what you perceive is required of The Missionary (Itinerating Edition)–it’s exhausting. Constantly living in fear of the disapproval of the people who review your progress every month…

I am not enough for the task I have been given. God never intended me to be. He didn’t give it to me because I would do it perfectly and instantly. I think maybe He gave it to me to teach me this:

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

God has given me many strengths that will be invaluable in the work I will do. He really has given me a calling that suits who He made me to be. But I am still not enough. I will never be learned enough or good enough or an efficient enough fundraiser.

Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
2 Corinthians 12:9

That’s the way it works, in those magnificent paradoxes that make up the Christian life. We are weak, frail, unable, fallible little creatures, and it is in our weakness, frailty, inability, and fallibility that the power of God carries out its work.

I am thankful for my strengths, for who God has made me to be. I am so thankful I can use them in the work He is doing in Europe. God’s creativity and kindness are revealed in them.

But I am learning to be thankful for my weaknesses as well. I am not enough for everything that life asks of me. Not sufficient. It is God’s grace that is sufficient and His power that is currently being perfected in my weakness. My weakness and lack of sufficiency and enoughness (new word; I invented it myself) provide a space in which God’s power works.

How nice not to have to be enough, not to have to fulfill all my needs all by myself. How nice to have Somebody Else to hand them to. (When I’m not busy taking them right back and cuddling them and pouting over them and worrying about them…) How lovely that the only Person I have to prove myself to is the only Person I don’t have to prove myself to.

At Missionary Training and Renewal, I met several different people who had some connection to the school I will be teaching at in Belgium, Continental Theological Seminary, so I got several different perspectives on it. One woman on the Europe leadership team had worked there for years some time ago and told me a lot of the practical things I wanted to know, like what the physical structure of the school is like (it is in an old chateau which was constructed out of the horse stables belonging to an ancient castle…). I had a lot of questions answered that people are always asking and I have no idea about since I have never been there. (Alas, I have no pictures that I have permission to use. But you can go here and see pictures for yourself.)

With Paul and Angela Trementozzi (on left) and Joseph Dimitrov (on right).

On the very last day, at the commissioning service, I got to meet two presidents of CTS. The last president, Roland Dudley, is now teaching at Trinity Bible College, my own alma mater, and I got to be introduced to him in passing there. The current president, Dr. Joseph Dimitrov, was also there. Dr. Dimitrov is Bulgarian and is the first non-American president of CTS. I’ve talked to him on Skype once, but I actually met him properly, and he prayed for me during the prayer service at the end.

But my first meeting was with Terry Hoggard, CTS’s Director of Development, and it answered my most important question: What on earth do you want me for? I have caught myself wondering, What have I got that someone else can’t provide for you? Am I really going to do something indispensable? Am I worth people supporting me when they could be supporting orphans in Africa?

Without knowing any of that, Terry told me about CTS’s goals for the future, and those goals are something I can contribute meaningfully to. The European model of theological education is totally academic and intellectual. Now, I adore the academic and intellectual, as anyone who knows me knows. But, he said, they need to learn how to integrate the intellectual with the spiritual. European students don’t expect their spiritual life to be enlivened by their theological education. The CTS leadership is making a concerted effort to move in the direction of community and spiritual life. Forty students were filled with the Spirit there last year! That’s nearly half the student body.

Davidson Hall at Trinity Bible College, my first dorm, now being refurbished for an academic building. Picture by Alyse Erbele.

Ever since I was at Trinity Bible College (I graduated in 2003), I have longed to help students make that connection. When you go to Bible college, you’re often warned to take extra great careful care for your spiritual life, because being in theological classes all the time can kill it. (Never mind that if you don’t take extra great careful care for your spiritual life, anything will kill it.) But I found the exact opposite to be the case. My spiritual life was enlivened and expanded by being at Bible college and in theology and missiology and Greek classes. When I learned something about, say, God’s purposes behind the sacrificial structure established in the Pentateuch in an Old Testament class, or about how Francis of Assisi became a Christian in a Christian history class, or about particular strategies for reaching a particular people group in a missions class, or about the significance behind Paul’s use of a participle in a particular passage in a Greek class…my mind expanded and with it my heart and my excitement about what God does and my enjoyment of who He is. Oh, I loved it.

That’s the teacher I want to be, not just one who says, “This is what a participle is,” but one who shows why the participle is important to the structure of Paul’s sentence and the overall goal of what he is trying to teach about God and the church. Or not just one who teaches the dates that Francis of Assisi lived and the structures he established in the Catholic Church, but one who can show how his life was transformed, how God used him to transform aspects of the Church of his era, how similar that is to what God did through John Wesley, how similar that is to what God wants to and can do in the Church in Europe…

CTS needs me. Isn’t that crazy? I need CTS, because I don’t have much teaching experience, and being there will give it to me. But they need me, too, because I have a perspective they are deeply wanting, and the very thing I have wanted to contribute to any school I am in is the very thing they want from me. Why, yes, I am actually worth people supporting. Because I’m called by God, for one thing, and because I’m going to go do something rather special He’s laid out for me.

I am at both an end and a beginning. I am at the beginning of the journey of being a missionary. It’s one I’ve been looking forward to for most of my life. But I’m at an end, too. This is the end of “normal life” (whatever that might be). This is the end of being a plain old American, a Montanan, a member of the workforce. I am already leaving my culture.

I am so excited.

My journey from “called to missions” to “itinerating as a missionary” has been a long one, 20 years in the making. I always thought I would be about 22 when I got here, not 32. I’m glad it didn’t happen when I was 22, because then I would be doing something entirely different than what I now feel called to do. It’s been a sort of gradual, gentle, meandering process of God sort of gently leading me here and there, giving me new ideas and dreams, and making me ready (I hope…*she says with some trepidation*) for the sudden fruition of my long-ago calling.

You can read about the initial development of my call here. I’ll write other posts about how my dreams have changed and grown over the last twenty years.

But here is the process I have been working through for the last few years:

Paying off loans.
“I’m in the ministry of paying off my loans so I can go into full-time missions.” I’ve said that often over the last couple of years.
To apply for AG missions, you have to not have above a certain amount of debt, because some of the money you raise in itineration will go to paying off your debt, and it’s not quite fair to ask all the hard-working people who support you to also support outrageous debt. I’ve spent the ten years since I graduated from college and the four years since I graduated from seminary paying as much of my school loans as possible, always paying more than the required amount in a bill. My college loans are almost paid off, and my seminary loans are cut down by half. God has always provided what I needed.

Being with my family.
I’ve known for twenty years that I’m going to spend the rest of my life far away from my family. After I moved away to college, I spent the next ten years not living in Montana, where most of my family lives. Soon after graduating from AGTS, I suddenly felt the need to move back to Montana and spend a few years with my family before the rest of my life happens.
I’ve been here longer than I anticipated, four years. I’ve worked with my mom, lived with my dad, seen my two sisters married, met my baby niece and two nephews soon after their births, visited with my younger brother on his return from Iraq and Afghanistan Army tours, gotten to know my other younger brother as an adult, hosted Christmas at my house for the first time, been involved in my younger sister’s in-laws’ ministry, and been present for three deaths and many weddings and births.

A portion of my family. Photo by Dan Hockensmith.

Getting my ministerial license.
A minister’s license, if not ordination, is usually a prerequisite for full-time missions.
This was a journey in and of itself. There was an application process, multiple references needed, a test to take, two interviews, and finally approval and the licensing service. In the interviews with local pastors and district leaders, I found that telling them why I wanted a license when I wasn’t going into pastoral ministry and describing my calling moved me deeply and made me cry. I tend to find this a little humiliating, but the fact was that the men I was talking to could see my passion for my unusual calling, and God gave me favor in their eyes.

Applying for Assemblies of God missions.
This was such a process that I’m going to write a whole blog post about it. The short version is that it took more than a year from the time I first asked for an application until the time I was officially approved by the World Missions Executive Committee on October 18, 2013. The long version is…it was ultimately a good process.