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Several years ago I wrote a series of articles for Evangelical Missions Quarterly called “What’s Holding Up World Evangelization?” I included the usual suspects: the churches, the mission agencies, strategic hurdles (lack of qualified people, misplaced priorities, and so on), and opposition and hostility in the world. Since then I have added another culprit-things missionaries call “distractions.”

Distractions do not merit space in missiological tomes. They do not make the prefield curricula. They are real, nevertheless, and they are devastating.

Sometimes our enemy fights us head-on, but we are quite surprised when he sneaks up on us from behind and hammers us with things that seem so innocuous. They are not evil, but they sure do gobble up our time and energy.

Distractions are so disabling because they keep us from doing the main thing-whatever the core of our vision and goals may be. They distract us from what we believe God has called us to do. They are like nasty detours on the main highway. They are like quarterback sacks and fumbles on the way to a touchdown.

On one of my mission field visits I saw distractions running rampant. They weren’t really running. That’s a bad metaphor, because they stalled and choked the team’s evangelism and church-planting efforts. I saw missionaries distracted for hours waiting for their mail. That was in pre e-mail days. Now they are distracted by e-mail.

I saw missionaries distracted by broken cars. I saw them distracted by internal strife. One day I sat in a team meeting and saw missionaries waste hours arguing over where to hold the next team picnic.

Nowadays it seems that computers-wonderful as they are-can cause terrible distractions. Here is one tale from the front:

“Our desktop’s hard drive started to crash. . . . Finally got the computer to boot, but the disk is making clicking noises. Returning from the store with a new hard disk, I turn on our desktop and POW! The power supply goes up in smoke. Return to the store to find out the power supply is a nonstandard size. Head two hours across town to get computer stuff, and they don’t have it. Purchase a whole new case plus power supply. Shopkeeper wires it up wrong and it won’t power up. Finally get the computer powered up, but now the old C: drive doesn’t even register. . . .”

Not the kind of grabbing news that makes you want to stop and pray for your missionary, is it? And that was just the beginning for this missionary, because two of his colleagues also suffered computer breakdowns and asked him to fix theirs. His conclusion: “We’ll never get any work done if we have to spend all our time fighting problems like these.”

Not all distractions are mechanical. Many of them are personal. Missionaries’ children get sick and balky. They consume their parents’ time, energy and prayers. It’s hard for them to keep their focus. They get discouraged and Satan uses family problems to short-circuit their ministries.

Sometimes missionary colleagues gum up the works, opening more doors for Satan’s fiery darts. Misunderstandings arise. People demand apologies. Broken relationships must be restored, draining enormous megawatts of emotional energy.

We surmount distractions by recognizing them for what they are. Each one forces us to look at our playbooks again, and to seek God’s wisdom and deliverance from the quicksand.

December 7, 2001