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Grandma stood in the back of the room, cradling her youngest grandchild, a three-month-old girl. Tears welled in her eyes, because in a few days the baby would fly off to Africa with her parents and two other grandchildren. Grandma’s loss and pain would be enormous.

Grandma has over many years enthusiastically encouraged her church to send and support its sons and daughters in world missions. Her church’s missionary family has grown significantly over the years. As a member of the missions committee, Grandma is intelligent, well informed, prayerful and sacrificial.

She cried when it became her turn to release her daughter and her family to service in Africa. Her tears were not tears of anger. She did not cry because she was mad at God. She cried because she was human and not impervious to her separation from strong and tender bonds of family love.

The new missionaries grew in the best possible soil. Their families and churches nurtured them well. Missionary spirit ran through their lives like the blood in their veins, so it was not at all surprising when they set their hearts on southern Africa. But when departure time arrived, Grandma cried.

Her tears for all to see were a model of what it costs to believe and obey Jesus. He talked about the pain of such separations for his sake. He also promised unspeakable joy and peace for those who follow him. God’s saving mission has been costly from day one and it always will be. Nothing in modern technology or missionary experience will ever change that fact. The cost of giving our sons and daughters remains a Mount Everest in the minds and hearts of many parents and grandparents.

No matter how exciting and thrilling we try to sell missionary service, and no matter how many shots of psychological Novocain we take, pain will emerge in every parent and grandparent whose children leave them for the sake of Jesus and his mission.

The world will be blessed and enriched as new missionaries are birthed to spread the good news. But to welcome more “new births” into our universal missionary family, we must continue to speak to the issue of the “wombs” in which they grow.

Grandmas are inextricably involved, but too often overlooked. Therefore, our churches should not only include them in their missionary prayers, but also in their nurture. “Member care” advice permeates missionary literature, and that’s a good thing. But it should also include those who are left at the airport when their children and grandchildren depart. Perhaps two or three times a year grandmas (and grandpas, too) could get together and talk freely about their fears, their sense of loss, and how better to cope with their circumstances. They enter uncharted waters crammed with dangerous shoals.

They haven’t taken any courses in how to be a successful missionary grandparent. No one way is the right way to cope for everyone, but shared experiences offer hope and strength.

Of course, such missionary grandparents’ gatherings are needed only when churches do more than sing, “O Zion, haste,” but actually send their own children.

Christ’s mission is a costly but exceedingly valuable family affair. Happy are those churches who are enriched by grandmas who teach and encourage missionary service as a high and noble calling, and then, with tears in their eyes, say good-bye to their own flesh and blood.

November 23, 2001