Reluctant MK | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: Reluctant MK | Previous Challenge Entry
By Lisa Enqvist
01/20/16
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Smoke, soot, and sand blew in the open windows of the steam train. The wooden bench, transformed to a berth at night for the fifty-hour journey from Cochin to Bombay, was no comfort. My sister could not climb up to her “third-floor” berth day time. The metal bar holding up that ledge was piping hot.

My parents were taking us home to Finland. For me, home for the past seven years had been Ceylon.

There was no way back. From Bombay, a Passenger Liner would carry us to England. Other vessels would take us home. Nine years earlier a similar journey thrilled me. I would see the land where I was born. I would meet my relatives for the first time. I would not be a foreigner anymore.

The hooting whistle of the train, along with the rattle of the wheels over the rails, emphasized the misery my teenaged self, felt. If this was missionary life, I wanted nothing of it! Ever again. The past seventeen years were enough. I would never, ever be a missionary! I would never go back to my father’s Gospel ship. I would never marry a missionary. I would never have kids who would grow up as rootless as I was.

Looking out at the dry landscape, I hoped, please God, never call me to India.

I had closed my heart to all talk about the Holy Spirit. I didn’t want to “receive power to be a witness to the end of the earth”. (Acts 1:8.) I wasn’t ever going abroad again, so I didn’t need that power. Yet, just one year after that journey, I was filled with the Holy Spirit. I left my home in Finland for studies in England soon after that. The Holy Spirit revealed the love of Jesus in a way I never knew before.

As my Nursing school finished three years later, I longed to be back home with my beloved Grandma and aunts. My parents had returned to the mission field. I begged God to let me stay in Finland as long as Grandma lived. During my third year in England, God had spoken over and over again about discipleship. Matthew 16:24, Matthew 10:38, Mark 8:34, Luke 9:23. I knew in my heart, that for me, it meant leaving home for India! I felt homeless and rootless in England. I wanted to deepen my roots in Finland, where I had spent only three years out of twenty-one. Grandma would be 84 when I returned. It couldn’t be too much to ask of God, to let me live in Finland while I still had a grandmother.

Two months later, September 11, 1966, the imaginary towers I had built for my own future, were torn down through a sermon based on Luke 9:57-62, “The Cost of Following Jesus”.

1. I knew first-hand what “foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head,” meant. Our family had lived that way.
2. Now I had been bargaining with God to let me stay with Grandma to the end of her life. (She lived another eight years).
3. My “other family”, the church where my mother had been in her youth, was dear to me. I wanted to be there as long as possible.

The preacher finished his sermon with the words, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”

I ran down the aisle crying. I had probably used up all my opportunities to say “yes” to God’s call. I had spent the past year bargaining with Him: “Let me first…”

A lady missionary, who was home from Africa, came to pray with me. She asked, “Why are you crying”?
“God has called me to be a missionary, but it is so difficult.”

Her words and her prayer helped me finally to surrender my life wholly to God’s call. Eighteen months later I was on my way to the “ends of the earth”. After about 21 adult years in Asia, including India, aggressive Arthritis gave me permission to live “at home” in Finland.

I’m still reaching out, to the end of the earth, though now through writing. Discipleship is the richest way of living.

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