The Meaning of Life

In the marvelously told story written of 23 young men, from the same small town in Virginia, who landed on Omaha Beach in 1944, the author recounts how there were two types of young men in those Higgins boats.  Some that were clinging to life and those who already had come to the point where they anticipated they would die that very day.  It would be those who had ‘already died’ before they hit the beach that eventually won that day. We must ask the question, “Shouldn’t the pioneer church planter have a similar mindset?”  I don’t think we have to wonder how the Apostle Paul would answer that question.

Those missionaries who went to Africa packing their belongings in coffins were not looking to return to England. Amy Carmichael would serve in India for 55 years…and die in India. When asked by a potential missionary, “What is the missionary life like?” she wrote back, “It is simply a chance to die.” Can such consecration even be envisioned in the day and age we live in?  It must be, or the churn of missionary attrition will not lessen!  The sacrifices to be made by those going to language groups without the gospel may not be in lives lost in physical death, but in decades and decades of sacrificial living in remote, closed, inhospitable locales.

—Brad Buser (Founder of Radius International, Brad and his wife Beth planted a church among the Iteri people in Papua New Guinea).