DISTURBING IRONY

I've had a prayer by Sir Francis Drake taped to the door to my office for some time. He wrote it in 1577 as he prepared to circumnavigate (successfully) the globe. It is powerful and challenging and has helped me to crystalize my thoughts and reflect upon why I'm going on mission to Senegal.

Here's the prayer:

Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves, when our
dreams have come true because we have dreamed too little, when we arrived
safely because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess we have lost our thirst for the waters of life; having fallen in love with life, we have ceased to dream of eternity and in our efforts to build a new earth, we have allowed our vision of the new
Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, to venture on wider seas where storms will show your mastery; where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars. We ask You to push back the horizons of our hopes; and to push into the future in strength, courage, hope, and love.

The nature of missional living is to embrace the unknown. It expands our vision. It expands our heart. It expands even our soul. It removes comfort and creates risk, yet replaces it with a peace and security found only by faith. Missional living the is disquieted by the temporal and dreams of the eternal.

So here's the irony...

The beauty of Sir Francis Drake's prayer is overshadowed by his own dark record. Along with his uncle, he was a key figure in the expansion of slavery during the Elizabethan era. He personally participated in the abduction of countless West Africans, forcing them to live their lives in forced labor on European plantations. He prospered off their pain. He robbed the very people our team is going to serve of many of their ancestors.

Like so many in our own generation, Drake was driven by ambition. He sought fame and fortune, accolade and acknowledgement. And in his prayer, he even sought the sanction of God for his humanistc thirst for adventure. We see much of the same in our world today.

The words of the prayer still challenge me though. We are not driven by personal ambition but by divine commission (The Great Commission!). We are not seeking fortune for ourselves, but an eternal inheritance for the precious people we will serve. We are disturbed by the injustice of their history. We are disturbed by the blind eye the world has turned to these forgotten people. We are disturbed that daily they die without knowing the One who died for them.

And so, in strength, courage, hope, love and great faith...we GO!

(At least once I get packed!)

In HIM,
Ryan