First reflections on a difficult task

Okay, so I know it is Christmas and I am supposed to be thinking about Jesus being born and making sage observations of theological and/or spiritual significance.  But actually, for the last six weeks or so I have found my spare moments occupied with the thought that it is ten years since we finished out time with OMF International.  It is hard to leave a group of people that you love; it is sad to let go of membership of an organisation that you have been part of for nearly twenty years.

The three month sabbatical with which we finished off was totally inadequate for the trauma that came before, but I don’t suppose anything different could have changed the fact that it would take years to manage thee grief of all that the leaving entailed.  So, after ten years I have decided to reflect deliberately on the time just before … the three years of being the National Director for Southern Africa and what made it so hard.

When I decided to do this every time I sat down to write nothing happened.  It was as if my fingers knotted themselves and declared me dumb.  Eventually I managed a word-storm with pencil crayons on paper! So now I try again with the first thoughts about the three years.

Interestingly first words flung onto that page were about relationships.  People: too many to count and so many only met once, or never met at all.  But there were deeply significant relationships, which became then part of the loss to be grieved.

This task that I was assigned was not only a task; it was a position.  It was a position with a history and so a lot of the way people related to me had nothing whatsoever to do with me!  This required humility and gratitude.  There were all these people supporting and loving me just because I had been appointed to do this task.  But that was, alas, something of a minority.  Over quite a long period OMF-ZA had been through a very hard time and there were a lot of people who had disagreed with some of the decisions taken by my predecessors.  So I had a lot of people who related to me with suspicion – they didn’t trust the guys who came before and they were not about to trust me.  But there was worse.  A number of people had built up considerable anger with leadership of the organisation, and they were naturally extremely angry with me.  It was so interesting to be on the receiving end of this rejection that wasn’t really personal. 

Oddly enough I didn’t find this difficult at all.  I think God really enabled me here.  I felt an overwhelming tenderness for all the precious people who became part of my charge.  The anger and resentment didn’t hurt at all.  I found myself delighted by the wonder of all these different people, and experienced a deep longing to touch their lives positively, to somehow show that they were loved.

I had ideas for how to go about building relationships and plans for showing people that they were respected and loved.   But there is the rub.  The responsibilities were vast.  There were five distinct defined groups of people:  the missionaries (in East Asia and on home assignment in South Africa), the staff employed in South Africa to help run OMF here, the board supporting and making decisions, the people who led OMF prayer groups, and the pastors of churches which were “home” to missionaries.  There were also the more occasional and intensely important applicants.  Now that is a lot of people, but there was also a large amorphous lot of people who would be called “supporters”.

I was incapable of giving the pastoral time to all these people.  It was a constant tension for me, a sorrow.