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I just finished reading a book that was recommended my Tim Challies as his book of the year last year. I’m not going to try to compete with Challies’ review, but I would like to write a few short blogs with quotes of some of the ways this book impacted me.

As I read this book, I kept wanting to re-title it “Memoirs of an Ordinary Missionary”. Tom spent much of his life as a pastor in an extremely unreached French speaking group in Canada. During the majority of his life he saw few converts and truly lived the life of what we would consider a long-term missionary. However, as I read on, I realized that D.A. Carson (Don), had it correct. As we are placed in our areas of ministry, whether it be in the workplace as Tom was for a good decade or it be in what we would consider full-time pastoral ministry, we need to recognize that we are all missionaries to those around us and therefore the pastor title comes to those providing “pastoral care”. I think if we look at his life as one of a missionary and our lives separate from that, we do ourselves an incredible disservice. We allow ourselves to view his life as one that is more dedicated to sharing the gospel to the lost than ours. We all need to approach our lives as Tom did, 100% focused on seeing the Gospel brought to the lost around him.

With that said, Tom has a lot to teach us. I am currently working on several notes ranging from what he teaches us about faithfulness to what he teaches us about loving our wives. I am excited to write my notes out from this book. I was frustrated that I had read this book so slowly (~25pgs/week), but am glad in retrospect that I was able to meditate on his life for such a long time. I’ll be posting notes about this book once or twice a week for the rest of the month.