Stranded at World's End

Many times, as a missionary, we feel forgotten:  forgotten by friends and family, forgotten by those who have promised to uphold us in prayer as serve so far away, and sometimes (even though we may not dare to say it) forgotten by God.  Living on the other side of the world may make you feel as if you been “stranded at world’s end.”

One of the things I appreciate the most about reading missionary biographies is that they have often experienced the very same emotions that we do today.   Isobel Kuhn’s In the Arena is a favorite.  She is very transparent about her struggles and quick to share how God helped her in those struggles.  Her chapter, Stranded at World’s End, addresses those feelings that can so often threaten to consume us...

“How wonderful to find Him always there, when we have unexpected need of Him!  That living touch with Him is so precious; it makes Him so real; it obliterates the line between the earthly and heavenly; it is so humbling to find Him waiting there.”

“There are many apparently needless trials in life, but the Lord stands with us through all of them.  ‘May you lose nothing in the furnace but your dross,’ said Samuel Rutherford.  The Lord will preserve everything else for us.”

“Stranded at world’s end?  Maybe.  But if we lean back we will find ourselves on the bosom of Christ—sweet, familiar place.

Sometimes on the Rock I tremble,

Faint of heart and weak of knee;

But the steadfast Rock of Ages

Never trembles under me!”

__________

“Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.” -Isaiah 49:15

*Quotations are taken from In the Arena by Isabel Kuhn, pages 178-180.