The End From the Beginning

One of the neighbors across my street is an experienced long-haul commercial airline pilot. In an occasional exchange when we cross paths, she might share that she has just arrived from—or is about to leave for—Rome, Tel Aviv, or Seoul.

A few weeks ago I met her outside my house, and as she and I were sharing some impressions about planes, layovers, and airports, I asked her, “Do you love your job?”

“Oh, I love it!” she replied. “I absolutely love it!”

“Well,” I told her, “I have asked this question to several pilots, and I still have to find one who tells me they hate their job.”

She agreed. Somewhere there might be a pilot who detests being a pilot, but we haven’t met that person yet.

Unlike other professions, those who invest so many years and dollars in training, going through a rigorous and strenuous program to become and stay certified pilots, do not imagine themselves doing anything else. They were born to fly, so to speak. And all those who fly as passengers or flight attendants can feel safer and reassured because of it.

On the Mission Field

There is another group in which I haven’t found major regrets about life choices. It is made up of those who, following God’s leading, have spent part or the whole of their working lives serving in the mission field. Problems? Many. Challenges? Galore. Moments of uncertainty, doubt, or sorrow? You name them! Some of them left their health on the mission field. Others had to put some of their loved ones to rest and left them there till the resurrection morning. Some returned exhausted and financially poorer. And yet . . .

Time and again, as I travel to near or distant places and talk to Adventist missionaries around the world, they say the same thing: “I couldn’t have chosen better”; “I wouldn’t do it differently”; “I wouldn’t change a thing”; “I know that I am doing what the Lord wants me to do, and for me that’s enough”; “No regrets, no regrets whatsoever”; and “Here I have found my life purpose.”

A Change of Direction

Many of those missionaries never imagined they would end up doing what they are doing. They had other plans, projects, and ideas of how they expected their lives to be. Their blueprint was substantially different.

But then they sensed a call. Not any call. The call. Some doors they had believed safe and certain closed. Other doors, however, opened—sometimes into the unknown.

Those missionaries—they tell me—were often compelled to leave their comfort zones. They had to leave extended families, leave the culture they were used to, learn to eat differently, foray into a new language, and acquire unanticipated skills. They often faced misunderstandings as their motives, words, or actions were lost in translation. And yet . . .

Looking Forward, Looking Back

“Too many, in planning for a brilliant future, make an utter failure,” wrote Ellen G. White. “Let God plan for you. As a little child, trust to the guidance of Him who will ‘keep the feet of his saints’ (1 Sam. 2:9).” And then she adds a sentence that has become the mantra for those who trust in wise guidance for life choices, which is well above themselves. “God never leads His children otherwise,” White wrote, “than they would choose to be led, if they could see the end from the beginning and discern the glory of the purpose which they are fulfilling as coworkers with Him.”[*]

“The glory of His purpose!” Infinitely better than the perks of a paid layover in Rome.

[*] Ellen G. White, The Ministry of Healing (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1905), p. 479.