“What do we do when we can’t do what we do?” 

The question popped unbidden into my mind one afternoon while I was pruning roses in our small backyard. It was the beginning of what would become a two-month quarantine in Peru during the COVID-19 pandemic. This lockdown had already canceled Bible dedications for translations of the entire Bible in two Quechua languages. When the borders of the country closed, we had to cancel all of the church and college teams who partner with us during the summer months. Then the Peruvian president announced that large gatherings of any sort would not be allowed for the rest of 2020 and quite possibly well into the next year, too. This touched every aspect of the work we’d been doing in Peru, since we wouldn’t be able to share in any church services, hold training workshops for pastors or evangelistic meetings in villages, or teach assemblies of schoolchildren.   

So I asked myself a legitimate question… 

“What do we do when we can’t do what we do?” 

I didn’t like this question, in part because I used to be a high school English teacher and I didn’t think I would have allowed my students to write this in a paper. It’s not grammatically incorrect, it’s just… awkward. 

But I mostly didn’t like the question because it made me take a deeper look at my perception of myself, my “ministry work,” and what gives me worth.  

Right then, I couldn’t DO any of the activities that we often think make up our identity as global workers. 

Instead, God was giving me the opportunity to re-discover who I AM in Him. We find this in His Word: 

• He reminds me that I was chosen to be royalty and that I am his special possession. (1 Peter 2:9-10) 

• He tells me that I am his friend. (John 15:15) 

• I am adopted into his family, I am his child and heir. (Galatians 4:5-7) 

• He gives me the hope that one day, I will be like him! (1 John 3:2) 

So there’s the answer to my question: When we can’t “do what we do,” we learn to rest in the promises of who we are.