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.
