Mission: Impossible was a TV series that chronicles the missions of a team of secret government agents known as the Impossible Missions Force (IMF). A hallmark of the series would show Agent Briggs or Agent Phelps receiving their instructions on a recording that then self-destructed in a puff of smoke, followed by the theme music that built the suspense. It began airing in 1966 and as a fourteen year old, I never missed an episode. I have since watched all the M:I movies with Tom Cruse. They are in my opinion good movies but not nearly as good as the TV series.
With that in mind, two books have caught my attention. The first is The Mission-Minded Child and the other is The Mission-Minded Family. I heard the author, Ann Dunigan, being interviewed on Christian Radio and her thoughts and experiences with her own children were inspiring.
That interview took me back to the time our children were just starting elementary school in Alamogordo, New Mexico. We began to take an evening every week as a family and walk our children into the poorest neighborhoods in our city asking people if we could pray for them. To us, it was Mission: Impossible but with the leadership of the Holy Spirit, we experienced one God-thing after another. We prayed for the sick and saw healing, we helped people open their hearts in faith and receive the gift of salvation. Many families we visited would invite us in for homemade tamales and enchiladas. Some would ask us where we attended church and we would meet them the following Sunday at church.
We were extending the Kingdom of God while at the same time teaching our children that they were not the center of the Universe. We did not realize how important those lessons would be to our family as God prepared us for our destiny.
Ann Dunigan writes in her book, “In a mission-minded family, there’s a God-infused energy. There’s a focus on God’s worldwide purpose and there’s a passion for the lost. There’s a spiritual depth and hunger that reaches beyond the maintenance mode of cultural Christianity. A mission-minded family emphasizes leadership, calling and destiny. There’s a prevailing attitude of self-sacrifice and an emphasis on total submission to God’s will. There’s an unmistakable and contagious joy and the fulfillment for the need for families to balance and prioritize their everyday lives and delve into what a family’s finances would look like if they were focused on missions.”
I’m not trying to sell you a book. But I am encouraging parents and grandparents to take seriously the Great Co-Mission. And by the way, the mission of God is never Mission: Impossible because with God, all things are possible.