What’s Your Mission Field?
We bought our first home last month, after decades of transient living in rented housing, both separately and together. I’ll never forget the day we looked at it for the first time. As we walked through its then-empty rooms, footsteps echoing on the hardwood floors, I was imagining all the people we could invite inside its walls.
We have a dedicated guest room for the first time, with its own en-suite bath. The family room, with its fireplace, cathedral ceiling, floor-to-ceiling windows, gabled skylights, and one wall composed completely of stone, is large enough for a sizable gathering of family and friends. I envisioned it at the holidays, a massive Christmas tree as its centerpiece. The library-to-be I imagined as the site of future book club and knitting group gatherings. The possibilities for hospitality in this house, which I mentally christened Ingleside after the adult home of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Shirley, are endless.
About her Ingleside, Anne said, “It isn’t too old a house … too old houses are sad. And it isn’t too young … too young houses are crude. It’s just mellow. I love every room in it. Every one has some fault but also some virtue … something that distinguishes it from all the others … gives it a personality.”
This is exactly how I feel about our new home. It’s what I hope visitors will sense when they step through the front door under its transom window.
I also hope they will sense the presence of Christ.
A year or so ago, a missionary family visited our Sunday school class. During their talk on missionary life in Central America, the man said something along these lines:
If you’re not living out your calling in the mission field, you’re not living out the right calling.
At first, I was irked by his words. Not everyone can be a missionary, I thought. I can’t just load up my family and go overseas. Besides, we support missionaries–we’re the people missionary families rely on in order to continue their work. So what is he talking about? It just doesn’t make sense.
As time went on, I came to understand that “the mission field” doesn’t always mean an overseas post. It doesn’t always mean uprooting yourself, fundraising, or learning a foreign language. Sometimes, a person’s mission field is their home.
A lot of ministry work goes on in my home already. I manage this blog, working with a group of talented and passionate writers who want to share their faith on the virtual page. I work diligently at raising my daughters to know and follow Christ. I have a day job at a faith-based publishing company whose mission is to communicate the love of Christ across the globe by spreading the Gospel through books. I pour myself into family members and friends both near and far right from my kitchen table.
If our hearts are rightly focused, simple day-to-day living becomes the mission field.
A group of my mom friends, most of whom are Catholic, attempt to think of their homes as “domestic monasteries”–places of learning, prayer, service, and hospitality, after the Rule of St. Benedict. It’s a lovely approach to home life. The intentionality inherent in thinking of home this way encourages continued reflection on the function of the home, on its role in the kingdom.
In this spirit, let me ask you: what does your mission field look like these days? Is it vibrant? Is it growing? How might God be calling you to more in your own mission field?
has loved the written word for as long as she can remember. A former English teacher turned editor, she has spent the past nine years in the publishing industry. A writer herself in the fringe hours of her working-and-homeschooling mom life, Harmony also has a heart for leading and coaching aspiring writers. Harmony lives in Memphis with her husband and two small daughters. She blogs at harmonyharkema.com.
Photograph © Peter Aschoff, used with permission
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