No matter how successful you are success doesn’t grant you immunity from humanity. We all have days when we want to wave the white flag and call it quits.
There was a white-flag-day I’ll never get out of my head. And I wouldn't have it any other way. It happened in August 1979 in Attawapiskat, Ontario.
My new bride and I honeymooned as volunteer missionaries in Canada’s north. Any woman who endured what Jocelyn did is a good wife. Let me just state for the record that I found a gem. We lived for a couple weeks in Sachigo Lake, 643km north of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Our second stop was Fort Severn on Hudson Bay. The third destination was Attawapiskat - an isolated First Nation located at the mouth of the Attawapiskat River on James Bay.
Everything about our experience felt foreign even though I never left the province of my birth. Each location was accessible solely by air. Jocelyn learned to use a washboard to clean our clothes. Our daily meals consisted of the bannock I learned to make using a Coleman stove. No TV, radio, Tim Horton's or movie theatres. We never settled into using outhouses, snaring rabbits or understanding Ojibwa or Cree.
By our third stop we were exhausted and sick. Hard work was familiar to us but we weren’t prepared for the strain of weeks of Day Camp meetings for children and church services for adults each night. And the evening services would sometimes last for three hours.
“I want to go home.” When your bride says that, you know the honeymoon is over. Our marriage was under the threat of never getting to our 3rd month anniversary. Only a few children came to our Day Camp in Attawapiskat. Try as we might to encourage people to attend our evening services the only residents who came near the building were there to throw rocks. Literally. We felt soul weary.
The last straw was burning my hand on the potbellied stove trying to fry eggs. I walked to the Hudson Bay depot, called the missions director and told him we were done. Please, could we just go home. He graciously arranged for us to leave on the next flight out.
As we waited at the landing strip for our plane, one of the residents approached us and asked why we were leaving. “No one is interested in what we’re offering and so we’re going home.”
What he said next shocked us.
“You are exactly who we need here. You shouldn’t be leaving. We need you.”
My first thought was, “Where were you when we needed you?”
As we mulled over his comment, the plane landed, we boarded, buckled into our seats and were soon in the air looking down with regret on a failed assignment.
It
dawned on us that we quit too soon. We started with the intent of finishing. Quitting was a quick way out of being discouraged, sick and tired. By the time the plane landed we came to the
conclusion that it's always too soon to quit. IATSTQ
We
had no idea how the phrase “It’s always too soon to quit” would save us in many more discouraging
seasons. Through forty years of pastoral work we kept going when everything inside
of us was screaming “Quit!” There is a big difference between finishing and
quitting and we determined that by God’s grace we would be finishers, not quitters. As a result leaders were formed, disciples were made, a congregation was relocated to a developing community and a come-as-you-are church is still reaching the skeptics, the used-to-believe and those who are far from God.
So much of what Jocelyn and I accomplished in pastoral ministry was because of that first failed assignment and learning that it’s always too soon to quit.
