I can remember in my early twenties, when I started my first career, how excited I was to get my dream job. However, it didn’t take long for me to realize that every job, even the dream one, has mundane tasks that no one wants to do. The same is true for the mission field.

Last week was one that held plenty of non-mundane tasks. I spoke at our church, in a small building constructed from mud bricks, with no AC, and just a few light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. My colleague drove into a remote village to show the “JESUS” film. My husband played soccer with some of the village kids while he waited at a remote airstrip. These are things in line with how I imagined this “dream” job would be. The “dream” did not include counting cashboxes and keeping endless spreadsheets.

An MAF flight from the Niassa Reserve to Nampula for a young girl with a leg injury, along with her parents, in conjunction with the Estrela de Manha medical project. Photo courtesy of MAF pilot Kent Embleton, shown here.

When we got back from our short furlough last April, I was tasked with keeping the cashbox that helps cover costs for patient care with the medical project we are involved with. My first response was, “Great, another cashbox to keep up. Like I need one more on top of the other cashboxes and bank accounts in multiple currencies I already manage… and this one isn’t even specifically for MAF!” But recently, as I was updating the ledger I began to get a sense of how this medical project is impacting individual lives. One day money was signed out to cover three different surgeries and three liters of blood. On another day housing and food costs were covered for patients flown in from remote villages who otherwise had no place to stay and no one to take care of them. Suddenly, this cashbox became a way for me to see and have a small part in some really amazing things that were happening. I may not be flying the doctors to the village, but in this “mundane” task I can see the hand of God at work. But don’t interrupt me while I’m counting the cash!