Making a living while living by faith

2/08/2011 11:01:00 PM sendtheroths 0 Comments

When we meet people for the first time and talk about our occupation or lifestyle, they tend to nod their heads favorably, non-verbally acknowledging, 'that is a good'.

Then, if they are truthful about their non-verbal gesture, an inquisitive look comes over them. This is usually followed by a hesitant but honest question.

“But how do you get paid?”

We keep the answer very simple.

“We raise everything we make.” The process however, isn’t simplistic at all.

Andrew and I raise the bulk of our financial support through faith pledges and commitments by individual donors. We also have the support of churches that give faithfully and other donors who give sporadically.

This is the beauty of God’s system for the Church; believers give to missionaries out of love and desire to fulfill the Great Commission. This is clearly displayed in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9.

But is support the only means in which we live day-to-day? Is support the only way we develop a base in Congo (DRC)? The answer is no.

Although, we believe that it is Biblical to live on support, it is not happening right now for us. If we were to really live off the support we receive, there wouldn’t be enough to do any work in Congo.

We rearranged our lives to make sure the work gets done. We’ve taken photos, wrote stories, designed websites, sold (all sorts of stuff) on eBay, taught Zumba classes, sold T-Mobile products and a lot of other odd jobs in between to make ends meet. We’ve hustled. This journey has forced us to get creative and gain multi-facetted experience in life and in business.

A millionaire once told me that entrepreneurialism is like hopping on floating ice-burgs. He said that as entrepreneurs, we need the mettle to hop from one ice-burg to another while staying balanced and ready for the occasional “wrong jump” we will eventually take. After falling in the freezing water, we climb out and play the same game again.

The millionaire had the metaphor right. We believe that Jesus is our courage though. He blesses and chastens us. And somehow, through our chastening, He makes us credible.

Credibility is key to missions and it is something we’ve been building slowly with people of all sorts: in the business world, in the ministry, in the Congo, so many kinds of people. It takes patience, discipline and faith-- the steps many missionaries quit too early on.

We pray that we won’t ever quit too early, we’ll have to get martyred first! But the road to credibility has been quite an exciting one.