While Washing Dishes

She stood over the left side of the sink, washing, while I stood over the left side, rinsing and stacking. Shoulder to shoulder, she patiently answered all my questions about what how Greek culture is different from American, what is good and hard about living in Europe, and what it is like to do ministry in such a time and place as this. 

“It’s funny,” she chuckled. “You said you wanted to come see what life is like in Thessaloniki and I thought, well she could wash the dishes!” 

This family picked up and moved their lives to Thessaloniki less than a year ago. They aren’t renting an apartment; they used up their retirement fund to buy a house. And they couldn’t be more joyful about it. They are in it for the long haul; they are settling. 

So what does life and ministry on the mission field look like? As I watched this cheerful, dish-washing, people-loving woman greet people in the market, love people at church, and strike up conversation with the waiter (who served me the best mousaka I’ve ever eaten), I got a pretty good picture. It looks like choosing to live in a place and then love that place and its people well. It looks like buying a house, settling down, and washing the dishes. It looks like showing hospitality, making friends, and leading those friendships to the spiritual level so that they can know Jesus. 

She and her husband and kids have only lived in Greece less than a year, and supporters already want to know what they are doing and what they’ve accomplished. “It’s hard to explain that all we’re doing is settling in and learning Greek, that we aren’t involved in a whole lot of projects,” she said with suds on her hands.

That’s because for them, missions isn’t about projects but people; it’s not about productivity but relationships. Relationships aren’t as measurable as baptisms and church plants, but the best measure of a missionary’s success isn’t in how many refugees he’s fed, but in how many people call him friend. 

All this even further settles it for me: “missions” isn’t just for the “missionary” like perhaps it’s been traditionally considered. If the way to do missions is to love a place and its people, to cultivate relationships intentionally and share Jesus, then it’s not just for an elite fleet of people called missionaries. It’s the joy of all of us. 

The more I read the Bible, the more I realize that being a follower or student (disciple) of Jesus is about just that - living like Christ in the place where you are with the people around you, loving others and sacrificing self and proclaiming the gospel. 

So discipleship and mission work are inseparable. Being a disciple is practically synonymous with being a missionary. And when you know Jesus, that makes even washing the dishes a holy love offering. 

Instead of people asking the missionary, “How many people have you shared the gospel with or baptized this year?” I’m the missionary turning the question back around on all of us, to empower and spur us on to love intentionally and live on purpose. How are you loving the place you are given with the people who are in it? Wherever you’ve settled, how are you showing hospitality and cultivating friendships? How can you take the hands of your friends and introduce them to Jesus? 

We dried our hands and went back to the couch, where our conversation continued. That’s how we spent most of our time in the short two days that I was in Thessaloniki. Since it was the weekend, most of the typical things I would have seen were closed - ministries, the refugee care center, even some people I would have normally met were out of town. But it was so good. Instead of cramming everything in like I normally do, I had time and space to wash dishes and take naps and go on walks, time to converse and linger and pray. This, too, I’m learning is part of missions and discipleship and just life in general - learning to balance work and rest, to be faithful in the more mundane, and to prize people more than my to-do list. 

We moved our conversation out to the balcony at one point, where the sun was setting in soft colors of pink. I leaned out on the rail, again shoulder to shoulder with my new hospitable friend, overlooking the orange tiled roofs of houses climbing up the mountainside in Thessaloniki. Together we prayed for one another, for the city, for the refugees and for the Greeks. As the breeze blew ever so slightly, I caught a new inspiration to love the places and people that have been given to me, too.