The Ultimate Mission
John Fischer

What could make you more nervous than a trip to Central Africa that requires three days of traversing marginal roads narrowing to near non-existence, wading through streams, and crossing rough-hewn and often improvised bridges to get to a remote village in northwestern Congo? According to Kathy Holmgren, wife of Seattle Seahawk coach, Mike Holmgren, watching her husband’s team play in the Super Bowl would have been more difficult to do. So when she discovered that a trip to accompany her daughter, an obstetrician, on a medical mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo was going to conflict with the Super Bowl, she decided to stick with the trip. "The actual game makes me so nervous I don't watch anyway.”

I understand exactly what she means. In a recent devotional I related my own nervousness viewing the collegiate football championship game, and I certainly was not anywhere near being connected to either of the teams in that contest the way Kathy Holmgren is connected to the Seahawks. (See “Rose Bowl Visitation” January 6, 2006.)

As it turned out, she made the right choice in that her husband’s Seahawks lost the game. Had they won, it still would have been the right choice. All this has turned out to be a great study in priorities that has received considerable media coverage due to the glut of news information this annual football classic always garners.

"(ABC) and other media are fascinated that Kathy's going to the end of the earth instead of being at the center of the universe," said Ann Brooks, a former television news journalist and currently executive director of communications for Northwest Medical Teams. But what no one has mentioned yet is the importance of being neither at the end of the earth nor the center of the universe, but in the center of God’s will. To see this correctly is to see it as people with a purpose living their lives well in whatever arena they find themselves.

So while Dad was fighting it out in the grandest arena of his sport, Mom and daughter were fighting to establish and train the staff of a medical hospital in one of the smaller arenas of the world. And in the end, which one counts more? Though you might think that in a devotional, the medical mission gets the nod, I don’t think so. In truth, if all of these people are doing what God asked of them, then nothing could be greater or more significant. Coaching a Super Bowl and serving on a medical mission are equally important if you are fulfilling what God put you here to do.

PDL