By Janet B. Villa
“I’m now a missionary,” I say. He frowns. He knows me to be—and still calls me—an attorney. “How did you get there?” he asks. “Did you go through a crisis? Did someone get sick?”
He considers my life’s detour puzzling.
One afternoon I attend the burial rites for my sister-in-law’s father, Daddy Cani, who was much loved. Family and friends wilt in the heat but stay for the final farewells, committed to honor the life he had led and those whom he had cared for. We watch as two workers heave a stone slab, twisting and adjusting it until its edges fit squarely into the burial chamber. They plugged the cracks with wet cement and smoothen it with a trowel. The scraping and the rasping fill the air as the body that Daddy Cani left behind is sealed in.
His leaving underscores the brevity of my own days. My life is just a prequel. Knowing how time betrays us all, Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, commissioned a servant to stand in his presence each day and say, “Philip, you will die.” It helped him remember to live his life in perspective.
After the memorial service, my older brother’s friend, Eugene, asks me to sit with him and share Shamrock meat pies. I must have been seven or eight when I started pestering him, as little girls are wont to do with older brothers and their ilk. More than forty years later, it is probably his turn to pester me.
“How are you?” I ask. He takes a long time answering. “When I get to this age, I find that I don’t know how to answer that,” he says. “Do I talk about my health? About what I do? What does that question mean?”
So he throws the question back at me. “How are you?”
“I’m now a missionary,” I say. He frowns. He knows me to be—and still calls me—an attorney. “How did you get there?” he asks. “Did you go through a crisis? Did someone get sick?”
He considers my life’s detour puzzling: no one in her right mind leaves what is familiar and favorable for something that, in his eyes, is triggered by trauma.
Perhaps in some ways he’s right. We confront God only in a crisis. And I have to be slightly a nut job to follow Christ. There is neither fame nor fortune nor health insurance. Borrowing Paul’s words in 1st Corinthians, I am a fool for Christ. How do I explain to Eugene what I didn’t even think twice about? God called, and we leapt, and His net appeared. This leaping and catching—this happens every day. How can one live like this?
I used to think that life was too short to be doing something I was not passionate about. So I left a lucrative law practice (Plan A) to pursue teaching and writing (Plan B), requiring me to go back to school to overhaul my education. Then a bigger truth emerged: Life is too short to be doing something without eternal significance. Enter Plan C. (My friend Giselle said that I was running through the entire alphabet.) I tell Eugene, “My success is only as good as my legacy.”
“No,” Eugene says. “Give that to me in terms I can understand.” So I tell him about how the film Gladiator opens. Before the men head to battle, the Roman general Maximus Decimus Miridius rallied his troops. “Brothers,” he said, steel in his face. “What we do in life echoes in eternity.”
My nephews are also nonplussed. “A missionary?” Gino says the word as if it were the first time the syllables had rolled off his tongue. My family’s love for me—their hesitation to say things that might hurt me—I feel it.
“Did you tell the rest of the family? What did they say?” Gino asks. Ours is a family of doctors, engineers, accountants, nurses—our successes are measurable. How would they measure mine? Maybe I should tell him that while I have no pay, my retirement (heaven) is “out of this world.”
“So what do we say? What do we tell you?” Gino asks as we bid each other goodbye. “Good luck?” He sounds tentative.
“Sure,” I say. I accept the love behind his sentiment. Love, after all, is the ministry gifted to me. I imagine that if I were to ask Jesus how much He loves me, He would probably say, “This much.” And He would spread his arms wide and die for me. What I do now is a response to that relentless, preposterous love.
Here, in this place memorializing the dead, my heart jump-starts with this truth: My job—God’s Plan C for me—is to help those who would listen to find Life in the land of the living. Eternity begins today. And someday, at the appointed time, a stone slab will also seal my body in. I pray that when that time comes, I would be able to say, as Paul did, that I have finished the race, that I have fought the good fight, that I have kept the faith.
Would Plan C be the most profitable use of my time? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it would be the best use of my life. (Photo of the Ozarks Lake sunrise by Zurita Ibrahim)
About the author: Janet B. Villa is a lawyer and writer based in Manila and together with her husband, basketball coach Jojo Villa, has dedicated her life to building Christian faith.
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