Serving beyond your comfort zone
January 01, 2020
I’m Jon Mark Page. My wife, Amanda and I along with our 3 children (Daisy, Ivy and
River) are serving as Missionaries-in-Residence at OBU. We have been serving as IMB
missionaries to Southeast Asia for almost 10 years.
Our main focus is church planting, but due to the location we have to have a platform.
In those 10 years it has ranged from digging wells for clean water to teaching 7th graders Southeast Asian history at a local school to lastly teaching how to raise
dairy goats.
One major lesson I think I have learned since being on the field is how incompetent
I really am at what I do. This is a good thing. Before you think it is an attempt
at false modesty you need to know something.
I went thinking I was going to bless hearts and win souls and coast on the stagnant
faith that got me by in many situations. What I have learned is that to really impact
the kingdom, we have to serve well beyond our comfort zone and ability. This is not to say God doesn’t gift us or that we don’t have strengths. What I mean
is that we have to attempt things so big that it is destined to fail without God’s
blessing and power.
This took time for me. My prayer life took on an entirely different significance.
I became more desperate in my praying. I once heard Angus Buchan say, “If your faith
doesn’t scare you, it ain’t big enough!” What I think he means is that God is calling
for modern day Elijah’s to call down fire from heaven. Never think you can’t make
a difference in the world. Look at how Jesus changed the world with a rag tag group
of fishermen and tax collectors.
When God called me into missions, I just knew He got it wrong. I’m not there yet,
probably won’t be this side of Heaven, but I am learning more and more that it was
never about me, but about what God could do through simple yielding to His Spirit
in us.
By Jon Mark Page, spring 2015 MIR
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