Where’s the mission field?

I’d never witnessed a beating. To this day I shudder when I remember it. I had been reading in my car before a doctor’s appointment and happened to notice a young woman leaving the hospital. She was maybe 25 years old, very thin, pale complexion, worried eyes. She wore tired jeans and a loose fitting blue and white t-shirt. Her sandal had a broken strap and slapped awkwardly on the cement walk. As she hooked her purse over her shoulder, I watched her look around anxiously scanning the parking lot. Perhaps that is what caught my attention — her apprehension attracting mine. Her body shook slightly and I saw that she was crying. As she walked toward me, the pain on her face displayed untold miseries as if she carried a horrible burden.

My heart went out to her. Had she just lost a loved one, received bad news, a fatal diagnosis? It made me ponder what my face looked like after learning I had breast cancer. Curious what we think about when viewing another’s pain. Screeching brakes startled me out of my reflections as an older model Sedan came skidding to a stop behind my car. “Get in!” screamed a clearly enraged man to the woman. Her crying stopped immediately when she saw him. In that moment, I interpreted her immediate calm as relief, like finally she had someone to share her burden, her sorrow. Now I imagine it was certain fear of what would follow. 

As soon as she got in the car, that huge, muscled man lit into her like a prizefighter on a punching bag. He struck her again and again — powerful, closed-fist blows to her face and belly.

“Who’s (smack!) baby (smack!) is it?” the maniac bellowed as her body absorbed the blows and ricocheted off the window and seat.

I screamed. A deadly, guttural, hate-filled roar welled up in me. Instinctively, I jumped out of my car spilling my book and purse onto the pavement. What did I think I was going to do? Rip her out of a moving car in Hollywood cop-story style? Save her from the clutches of a mad man? I simply screamed. I screamed at him to stop. I doubt he even heard me as he put his car in gear and drove his bleeding baby’s mother away.

Did I get his license plate and report the assault to the police? Did I check at the hospital to find out who she was and make a report to Child Protective Services? I’m ashamed to say those ideas only occurred to me later. What I did was sit down on the curb as if I’d been punched in the stomach; a groan escaping me in sympathy with hers. And then I sobbed. I cried for that woman’s beaten body, for the possibility that he had killed the life within her, for their future, for my impotence, for the hidden violence that effects 22 percent of women in our country.

I now carry my business cards in an easily accessible pocket or wallet. These perky little marketing tools advertising Christ Kitchen gift baskets and catered fare as well as my contact information are hardly a worthy defense against bullies or crazed offenders. But under our Christ Kitchen logo it says, a place of hope for women in poverty and I pray fervently for beaten souls to find hope. I hand these cards out to women in trouble, practicing for the time I am once again up against devastating odds. I pressed one into the hand of an overwrought mom in Target who was yelling at her crying baby. “Come see us,” I offered after she let me hold her child while she shopped. I jumped out of my car downtown and slipped a card into the shirt pocket of an inebriated woman slumped beside a building, hoping she might follow my prayers for her to our ministry.

If anything, the woman in the blue and white t-shirt taught me to be ready, intentional. My mentor, Jill Briscoe, always says, “The mission field is between your two feet.” At times it comes screeching to a halt interrupting our solitude and at others we have to act on simple clues God sets right in front of us. This must be what Paul meant when he wrote Timothy, “Be ready, in season and out of season, to preach the Word.” 

“Be the Word,” my Lord comforts me when this violent world assaults my sweet life with powerful blows as I watch the evening news or drive through my neighborhood. “Be hope to my lost world.”