Gracia Burnham is a popular speaker and the author of In the Presence of My Enemies, the bestselling Gold Medallion Award winner that chronicled the Burnhams' ordeal as hostages of the Abu Sayyaf. She and her late husband, Martin, who was a pilot, served with New Tribes Mission in the Philippines from 1986 to 2001.
"Late at night on December 30, 2003, I was sitting on the couch in my living room thinking about the year wrapping up. The kids were already in bed, the Christmas tree was still glowing in the corner, and the gas fireplace was burning. I had been home from the Phlippines for a little more than eighteen months. What had I accomplished in that length of time?
I started telling myself...
Gracia, you're not spending enough time speaking to groups. You need to be out telling your story. Invitations to churches and other audiences were indeed plentiful.
Gracia, this foundation of yours [which was started to channel money toward mission aviation, tribal mission work, and ministry to Muslims] would really be going places if you'd just put some energry into it. The Christian Community Foundation in Kansas City had done all the legwork, but the public voice for my foundation had to be mine.
Gracia, you're too busy. The kids really need you in these important years. Certainly. Jeff was already a junior in high school, while Mindy was in eighth grade, and Zach in seventh.
Before long I was overwhelmed with the list of what I should be doing. If you are like me, it's easy to get down on yourself for what you haven't done. You look at your recent past, and see one gaping hole after another. You should have taken care of this, and that, and the other...but you didn't. You start to feel like a total waste. Life, one again, is out of control. You are spinning your wheels, going nowhere.
This makes you feel inferior. Your overall impression of yourself plunges. You are just taking up space, consuming food and money, but not making a contribution to your family, your church, your community, your world. A heaviness hangs over your spirit.
For most of us, achievement and the affirmation of others are linked to value. If we don't feel we are accomplishing much, we assume we're not worth much. Considerable numbers of men and women look at their job performance and wince. Doing becomes a measure of being.
What we forget is that God made us with innate value, before we ever did a single thing to prove it. The theologians call this positional truth. Once we have received entrance into God's family, we are totally acceptable to him, even loved by him. We have the right to come boldly into his presence. We have been given eternal life. All of that makes us valuable.
Dozens of times in the New Testament letters we find this somewhat odd phrase: to be "in Christ." It cannot mean a literal insertion into his physical body, of course, like you would say you're living "in Pennsylvania" or swimming "in the lake." It is a metaphor, but a very powerful one, for being enveloped in the essence of Christ and thereby endowed with his attributes. To be "in Christ" includes:
-being alive to God (Romans 6:11)
-being without condemnation (Romans 8:1)
-being loved (Romans 8:39)
-being eligible for resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:22)
-being established (2 Corinthians 1:21)
-being triumphant (2 Corinthians 2:14)
-being a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17)
-being free (Galatians 2:4)
-being reconciled with people who are not like you (Ephesians 2:13; 3:6)
-being encouraged and consoled (Philippians 2:1)
-being confident (1 Timothy 3:13)
-in fact...having "every good thing" (Philemon 6, NIV)
These and many more blessings are ours as a result of our association with Christ. They are valuable in their own right. And they set us up to be high achievers in our world. From this base comes the strength to go out into life and be productive.
Just because our value is already established in Christ doesn't mean that we sit back and cease being productive. Instead, we recognize that the key to a Christian's accomplishment is only partly a matter of diligence and initiative and hard work. It is also a matter of being grounded in Christ, of attempting each task "with the help of Christ who gives me the strength I need" (Philippians 4:13). This is how we truly achieve.
Even as we rest in the inherent worth that God has given us, we know that someday we will all stand before the Lord for a review of our accomplishments. I think the review will probably be both quantitative (how many things we got done) and qualitative (how well we did them). The Lord will no doubt also ask whether those things were important or trivial. Did our accomplishments matter in the eternal sense?
I hope to give a good account of myself on that day. I certainly will not have achieved everything I hoped to or could have. I know there will be emberassing gaps. But as I live these years with my feet firmly anchored in Christ, I will achieve more than I ever could otherwise. I can face him with confidence and peace."
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