A FRIEND JUST told me something wise: Be skeptical but never cynical. In Assimilate or Go Home, a series of essays about her ministry and faith experience, D.L. Mayfield tells an even rarer story—of her movement from idealism through cynicism into a deeper faith. She manages to avoid sinking into an easy “wisdom” that simply excuses apathy.
Mayfield’s journey into an unperfected ministry starts when she is an idealistic high schooler, wanting to serve immigrants and refugees in her community. She discovers that this isn’t easy, as she works with and sometimes lives among Somali Bantu refugees, first in Bible college and then through her 20s. Even her best efforts aren’t what the community wants or needs. Instead, she finds her intentions thwarted and her ideals coming up short as she teaches English, mentors teens, and helps friends struggle through obstinate bureaucracies. All of this activity stalls in the face of a dramatically different culture and people who don’t want to be “saved.” This sense of frustration is mirrored in the structure of the book: We are never given much sense of the timeline of Mayfield’s life, just that the same challenges persist.
Mayfield describes baking a cake for the wedding of a girl she had mentored from a Somali Bantu family. This girl was only a junior in high school when she married and moved across the country with her new husband. Mayfield finds herself wondering if all the “countless conversations about colleges and careers ... harping on equitable marriages, on waiting to have children, on finishing high school” might have made things worse.
But Mayfield stays committed. Teaching women to read who, after months, remain unable to spell their names; drinking coffee with women whose husbands have committed suicide; and taking every opportunity to make Funfetti cakes and feed people. She stays in place, befriending people and accepting the grace that they offer. And this changes things, somehow. Mayfield resists pat conclusions, resting in God’s unfailing love.
Mayfield bookends her story with two essays about that evangelical classic: Vacation Bible School.
While in high school, Mayfield and a bunch of her suburbanite friends went down into the projects and pamphleted the area about VBS. They wondered how the exhausted moms coming to the doors could endure. The teenagers taught “happy little songs about Jesus to little children who were just barely treading water.” Leaving after a week, Mayfield is unsure what good she did in these kids’ lives, but she knows that her life has been irrevocably changed. She had been blessed by those she came to serve—cliché but real.
Years later, Mayfield is married with kids of her own and has just moved into a cheap apartment complex with many refugee and immigrant neighbors. High-energy high schoolers come to her door to invite her kids to VBS. She sees the scene through their eyes: exhausted mom, dingy apartment, and kids who desperately need Jesus and the wholesome fun that earnest teenagers can provide.
Mayfield feels the knee-jerk reaction of anyone told they need to be “saved,” especially after hearing the sin-focused VBS gospel. Then she realizes: These teenagers enthusiastically sharing Jesus with her kids are loved by God too. Even if they aren’t helping as much as they think, God doesn’t spurn even flawed attempts to serve.
God’s love encompasses not just those we want to “save” but also us trying to do the saving. Grace goes all the way down, and part of growing up spiritually is extending that grace to everyone, not just the sympathetic.
That is the faith beyond cynicism that Mayfield models. Though the book’s subtitle claims she is a failed missionary, she preaches a gospel that I desperately needed to hear.
Greg Williams works in digital communications at an advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. He tweets @gwilliamsster and blogs at fourthconfession.
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