Missions in All Spheres

We live in an era of activism and slacktivism, great apathy and great action.  I think the information technology boom that we've experienced in the past fre decades has pushed us as people into an age where we never could have guessed we'd be fifty, one hundred years back.  Lately, I feel like I've been blessed to look as one from outside, from the other side of the lens.  It's odd to me sometimes, to feel like I'm on the outside looking in.

St. Peter & St. Paul here in SF

I think of places, and pictures, the windows into places.  As a Christian in America, every day I have the opportunity to see the plight of starving children in Africa.  It's only a few mouse clicks away.  How odd it is to me that we live in a day and age where we, though removed thousands of miles, would view ourselves as desired to be the main source of hope and help for people in a context we've never known, in a land we've never visited.

This is communications' gifts to missions, to the church.  The power of communications grew as something we didn't expect.  During our forefather's generations, the groundwork for what we have now grew, quickly sometimes, and slowly others.  To think there was a time where steam power was seen as being the world's most glorious discovery.  We had computers the size of whole houses that would calculate a few equations.

It's easy to extricate the progresses of missions in our mind from what we would label as the progresses of man.  But if we take a step back, we can't quite pull the two apart.  If it wasn't for the Internet today, how hard would it be to find out, and who would know about the plight of Africa, or hundreds of other nations?  I have to think about this from time to time.  I have to remind myself that it wasn't just theologians and priests that have spread and proliferated the message of Christ, and the vision of the needy for would be helpers to see.  It was engineers, chemists, entrepreneurs, philosophers.  Somehow, we all have the ability to influence the whole arc of human existence for Christ.  Some of us throughout History have.  Taking up their crosses, and copper wires, their I-beams, their beakers, their telephones.

A view of North Beach from the St. Francis Shrine.  I'm
blessed play cello here once a month in remembrance of
St. Francis

I rest in Christ when He realizes to me, that I can be missional in the place I'm in, in communications.  And I thank the Lord every day for the ability to honor His kingdom with the gifts He gives me.  So ask yourself today, what is it that you do, what is your vocation?  The Spirit of God can be in many things beyond what we see in our minds as 'The Missions Field'.  Remember that you, too, and the hands of Christ, the beloved of Christ.