Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:4 NIV)

Last week’s devotional, “God, Please Don’t Send Me to Africa” caused a bit of a stir among some of our African subscribers who were concerned about the negative rendering of their beautiful country.

I was wrong to assume that everyone had the same experience I had, but the statement “Please don’t send me to Africa” became sort of an evangelical in-joke among people my age that grew up in white suburban churches in America. Fifty years ago, there was no place further away or more primitive and undesirable than the jungles of Africa. Every few weeks in Sunday night church, we sat through lengthy slide-show presentations by American missionaries of tribal “villagers” wracked with disease, pagan rituals and illiteracy, followed by an impassioned call to give our lives to serving God in this mysterious faraway land. The way it was presented made it the last place anyone wanted to go, so a call to Africa was seen as a sort of moral punishment. It never had anything to do with the real Africa since no on knew what that was.

Today, God is so much at work on the African continent that I am firmly convinced we in America need missionaries from African countries to come and call us to repentance from our complacency and affluence and put the fire of the Holy Spirit back into our lives and our churches. Firmly biblical African pastors are speaking into our flabby materialism and liberal theology. The mantle of Christian leadership may have already been passed. When I heard there was an outside chance the next Pope could come from the ranks of fine African bishops, I was hoping and praying that would be the case. I believe it is coming in the near future and it will be good for the gospel and the world. A more current version of the “in-joke” would be for an African young person to be praying, “God, please don’t send me to America.”

Bottom line, of course, is that everyone has someplace that would be the last place they would want to be called to go as a missionary. The idea that God probably will send us to that very place to do a job for which we are not gifted is the point I was taking issue with, as if God was in the business of punishing us with mission work.

God does delight in giving us the desires of our heart, so that if by chance He is asking someone to go to a place that would be last on their list of choices, it is only because that impression is about to do a complete 180 degree turnaround. The very thing we thought we didn’t want will turn out to be the greatest thing that ever happened to us. We were simply misinformed. God knew much better. It’s all relative. It could be Africa. It could be America. It could even be Anaheim. (Okay all you “Anaheim Angels” fans, I’m ready for all the “What’s so bad about Anaheim?” replies now…)