So You Want to Be a Missionary?

“So you want to be a missionary?” the stout Hungarian man from my church in Washington, D.C. commented almost sarcastically. “You’re going to tell all the Hungarians they need Jesus.” I stood in awkward silence. I knew he was a believer in Christ. What was his point in all this?

“You know what the Hungarians are going to say?” he asked. “They’ll say we’ve been Christian long before your country was ever discovered! We’ve been a Catholic nation since St. Stephen got the crown from the Pope a thousand years ago. And they’ll wonder who you think you are to tell them they need to be Christians.”

I stammered from side to side, trying to come up with a gracious way to leave, but Laszlo had not made his point yet and would not let me escape until he had.

“Trudy,” his demeanor now softened. “Take the time to earn the right to share your faith.”

That was ten years ago. Since then, I have taught English in Hungarian High Schools and colleges, gotten married, had one daughter while living in Turkey and adopted another from a Hungarian orphanage. Now, living in a Hungarian village near the Romanian border, Laszlo’s words often echo back in my mind as I have learned what it means to honor and respect people and their ways. We Americans tend to think we are the ones who have it all together, but such attitudes make us miss out on all there is to learn from those we meet along the way. I have been blessed by the Hungarians and as much as I long for my Hungarian friends to know Christ. I will never love them any less if they do not choose Him.