Health and the missionary candidate
by the M-DAT staff
Missionaries aren’t sent on their merry way with a pine box in tow anymore. Thanks to modern medicine and its worldwide availability, the life expectancy of a missionary is less affected by life-threatening disease than it used to be. However, your health still plays a significant part of life anywhere, even if you’re not afflicted with such an illness. Will your health limit when, where or whether you should go?
What about health issues not serious enough to keep you from going, but may still affect your ministry strength and flexibility? What if you have asthma or diabetes? What if you’re overweight or blind or bipolar? What about depression, allergies or bad knees? Is it irresponsible to go overseas as a missionary if you aren’t the complete picture of health? Or must your problem just be reasonably treatable?
Mission history would say lack of health doesn’t necessarily eliminate you. Lilias Trotter, for instance, was rejected by the mission board she applied with because her health wasn’t up to their standards.
Though frail in health, Trotter was convinced that God had a place for her in North Africa, even if she didn’t meet the prudent standards of a mission board. So she and a couple of other women set out on their own in 1888 as the Algiers Mission Band. Her health did affect her work in Algiers from time to time. Occasionally her weakness even forced her to take extended leaves from the field.
Yet she accomplished so much, and for so long! Lilias Trotter served in Algeria as a missionary for 38 years, living to be 76 at a time when the average life expectancy was closer to 45. What’s that verse about God showing himself strong through our weakness?
The key point seems to be - know your limitations. How will your health situation affect you? Under what circumstances will it limit you? When will others have to flex and adjust their schedules and ministry to cover for you? Are there things in the job description or environment that will trigger your health problems? Could you serve just as well in another location or in a different type of ministry? Then again, if God sends you there anyway, you wouldn’t be the first
to sacrifice your comfort for the sake of the gospel. Each missionary sacrifices some kind of comfort as they go overseas.
While composing these thoughts I talked to two people with knowledge of different sending organizations and how they view the health of their missionary candidates. The first does not have a written policy, but it does require a full physical and a doctor’s note saying, essentially, that you will be able to perform all the duties of your job. The second agency appears to carry out a fairly meticulous evaluation of your physical and emotional health as you plan to go and
then regularly on home leaves. If there is a problem, the sending agency does everything in its power to fix it and get you back on the field. Sending agencies desire for you to be there as much as you do, but they also want to be responsible in the stewardship of their personnel.
It is impossible to predict every health issue you’ll encounter overseas. Hudson Taylor’s health failed him after his first wife died. An acquaintance of mine suffered terrible mold allergies after moving to Bulgaria. Know your limitations. Know your options – options of treatments and medicines, options of facilities, options of seasonal time frames. You might be called on to overcome those limitations as Lilias Trotter did. Or as the motto “planning to go, willing to stay” leaves open, your involvement may be from this side, helping to send others.
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This comes down to a matter of faith. What do we believe? If God has called us to do something that is out of what we are capable of doing in the natural are we just going to give up and not even try? Faith requires action. We have to step out in faith knowing His Word and knowing that He cannot lie. His Word says that by His stripes we are healed. Therefore we must take hold of that. The thing that makes our God different than all the others gods of the world is that we have a perfect and supernatural God. He doesn’t do things through our natural means. He works in supernatural ways that, as long as we are on this earth, we can never fully understand.
Now, by all means, we should use wisdom. On the mission field we shouldn’t be exposing ourselves to unnecessary risks, as to tempt God’s protection and anointing over us, but we need to remember that God will not give us a more than we can handle. He will not call us to something we are incapable of doing.
From my experience in the mission field, I have found two main things to be critical. We must stay grounded in the truth of His Word and not the beliefs and opinions of man. Man’s opinion can be faith’s worst enemy. It is not about us. It is only about Christ and what He is doing. We are just the humble servants. The second thing is this; we must remain sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit. How many times have you done something simple and out of the ordinary only to discover that what you had done was something extraordinary that made a huge impact on someone’s life? For those of us sensitive to the Spirit it happens all the time. If you listen to the Holy Spirit on the mission field, He will guide you and protect you from danger, both from outside sources and from your own body. It’s as simple as that.