When the Curtain is Pulled Back

Isaiah 45:15 Truly, You are a God who hides Himself, O God of Israel, Savior!

Worshippers in Central Asia (shared with permission)

Having served in ministry for sixteen years in Central Asia, and a teacher in the US for the past decade, I know from personal experience that it is easy to doubt what you are doing and wonder whether you are making any difference at all.  It’s so easy to get discouraged and so hard to behold your life when it is so…daily.  It’s rare that people come back around to thank us for how we’ve impacted their lives.  I often wondered why.  Why does God ask us to persevere in what often feel like thankless tasks?  Then, a while back, I had a revelation:  Maybe God is hiding Himself.  Maybe He doesn’t want us to see the impact we are having lest we become proud and think it is by our own strength and cleverness that we have made a difference, apart from His work in our lives.  So His veiling of what is really going on behind the scenes is actually a mercy to us.

But every now and then, God graces us by pulling back the curtain.  We do get occasional glimpses of the impact we have made.  For example, a former student came back to me and told me that while he hated to admit it, the research papers I had made him write as a high school student had actually really helped him with all his writing assignments in college.  Good to know!  But it took years to hear that – it’s not as if high school students want to encourage you as a teacher to keep giving them tough assignments, after all.  It’s quite unusual to get this type of insight and encouragement about what you are called to do.

I had this rare and beautiful experience recently when I went back to Central Asia this summer with my youngest daughter, now almost 21 years old.  I had lived there 16 years and been gone for 12 with only occasional news from my local friends.  I wondered what I would find.  Would the believers have remained firm in their faith? Did I still have friends there?  Did I even remember any of the language?  By His grace, God pulled back the curtain for me.  From the moment we stepped foot on the soil of our adopted home country, my daughter and I felt at home.  When I opened my mouth I discovered that I was still fluent in the language despite not having spoken it for a decade.   Our local friends embraced us with open arms and welcomed us as if we were long-lost relatives who had come back to visit after having moved to a distant country.  But most amazingly, I found that my dear friends had not only held on to their faith but greatly deepened their trust in the Lord and even begun their own ministries with no help or direction from us. With my young adult daughter next to me, I realized that our mother/daughter relationship was a parable of how it is meant to be in ministry.  When the believers are young in their faith, of course they need people to come alongside and teach them.  But just as my youngest child is now grown up and no longer needs the level of help from me that she did as a little girl, so the believers have matured in their faith and no longer need me right by their side.  Of course, I still have a coaching and encouragement role, just as do parents with their adult children.  But what a blessing to see that the local believers taking what we had poured into them decades ago and running with it.  Furthermore they had their own visions and amazing ideas from the Lord that they were implementing, thus multiplying what we had begun.  And they had ideas for us about how we could periodically come back short term and assist.

Probably one of the best moments of our time in Central Asia was when we were eating lunch with some local friends and I mentioned a part of a spiritual story my husband and I had written more than fifteen years and published in Kazakh in our book Stories Old and New.  One of our friends exclaimed, “You wrote that?  I thought that was a Kazakh story!  I tell that all the time to people to encourage them.”  What a blessing!  God took a work we offered up to our adopted home country and integrated it to such an extent that no one knew it was ours.  That’s the goal.  If our friend hadn’t told us, I never would have known, but God in His grace chose to pull back the curtain this time to let me know the impact of what He had called us to do.

I think there is encouragement for all of us, myself included, in this.  So often we trudge along, carrying out what God has led us to do, but wondering the whole time what difference we are making, if any.  On bad days we listen to the enemy’s whispers that our efforts are fruitless and our lives are meaningless.  But  faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see (Hebrews 11:1).  What makes it faith is that we can trust we are having an impact but haven’t yet seen the evidence.  So I encourage myself and you all to carry on.  I know that I will be coming back to this post and re-reading it now and again because in the future I will probably need the reminder.  So I say to you and myself: Carry on!  Your life is impactful and meaningful and you are making a difference.

If you would like to donate to a ministry run by a Central Asian to encourage local believers, please click here:  Central Asian Ministry Fund.