The missionary life is, let's face it, luxurious, unreal and a little bit scary. Now I don't doubt that for some missionaries, the word "luxurious" may raise a few hackles. I know many of my brothers and sisters out there are having a really hard time. But at the same time, I imagine that most of them still have the freedom to decide their own schedules, to determine their own workload, and to prioritize spending time with people - rather than having to get up and do whatever someone else tells them, which is most of how their friends back home live.
If I really wanted to slack off, there are only two things I absolutely definitively need to do every week to keep people here content with my work: I have to turn up to church on Sunday with a sermon, and turn up to a meeting on Tuesday. Well, every other Tuesday. And I can miss that if I can come up with a good enough reason. So one and a half things a week. And that's before people here notice. People back home can get by with a newsletter a month. Not even that - I know missionaries who write home three or four times a year. If I really wanted to slack off, my base workload would not get in my way.
Now of course I have no intention of slacking off, and anyone who knows me knows that I would find it actually physically abhorrent. I am, if anything, a pretty driven person - I think that probably you have to be a little bit driven to be in this game - and I still consider any day I don't achieve something to be a wasted day. This is a bad attitude that I need to change; I'll be talking about the Sabbath principle in my leadership seminar in April and how the leader is not meant to be a superman.
But one of the things which actually adds to my natural drivenness is the guilt of knowing that I have this slack-friendly workload and someone else is paying for it all. I'm being supported because people back home think that what I do is worth paying for, so I try to make absolutely sure they're getting their money's worth out of me. Even then, however, because of the nature of a lot of my work, I still end up with a lot of guilt.
I spent yesterday afternoon playing go, which is my hobby. I normally do this on Thursday afternoons, but I had some time after a meeting, so I went over to the local community center and spent a few hours talking to people there. I used to play in Kyoto, but the players there are more serious and don't talk much, and now I've found somewhere in my own town I feel I'm a bit more part of the community. People in the community center aren't coming just to play go, they're playing because they're elderly and they want to have some human contact as well as a good game. So they chat a lot more, and as a foreigner (and fairly good player) I stand out and get chatting to them. And naturally they ask about what I'm doing here, and I tell them. Now there are people who have recognised me in the streets because I've met them at the community center, which is a state I've wanted to get to since I arrived. There's someone I got talking to yesterday who was interested in me and what I'm doing here and specifically asked me to come back and have another game and a chat tomorrow. Which of course I will do.
But looking at it objectively, that's two afternoons this week "off" playing games. On someone else's dime. Do you see where the guilt comes in? There's a sense of luxury and privilege here I find it hard to get away from.
This is, of course, the big problem with a job whose focus is on human relationships. You can't really measure the quality of the work that you're doing, except in terms of things like conversions per year - something that at the same time you admit you have no direct control over. Sometimes I wonder if some of the impetus behind "managerial mission" and trying to put hard statistics on a missionary's "performance" has less to do with trying to "haste the evangelization of the world" and more to do with managing the guilty of the good old-fashioned Protestant work ethic.
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