It’s the first question we get from just about anyone who knows (a) our names and (b) that we’re missionaries: “When do you leave for Germany?”

It’s also probably the hardest to answer, even though the answer is simple: we leave when we are fully funded, when churches and individuals have committed to give enough support to cover our entire monthly budget for at least one term (five years, in our case). It’s an answer Anna and I have given so many times that we feel we must surely be turning blue in the face by now.

But it’s not an answer that seems to resonate. Maybe we as a culture are fond of clear deadlines. Maybe most of us (with what I can’t help thinking of as “real jobs,” in unfavorable comparison with my own) think of work, even ministry work, as basically a contract in which the employee is given a clear start date when he or she is hired – that is, you start when you’re needed, at the pleasure of the one hiring you. For missionaries with some agencies, no doubt that’s closer to the case, and they can leave for the field less than fully supported if the ministry demands it. But there are good reasons for doing it the way our agency does.

The most basic of those reasons is a very obvious reality: our support base is in one country, our work in another, faraway one. Raising support is a task that requires making personal connections – you can communicate well enough from the field, especially nowadays, but it’s essentially impossible to meet new potential supporters and nearly as difficult to turn potential supporters into actual supporters by phone or email. And a second reason is like it: missionaries who have to raise their own support never really get to stop raising support. People lose jobs, encounter unexpected expenses, or just lose interest or forget; church budgets crash because of splits or economic downturns. Support goes away more quickly and often than it accumulates.

Take these realities together, and you can see why it would be a pretty bad idea to send us to the field without even once reaching 100% of our funding. We’d likely never hit 100% ever again, and while we would be able to set a clearer start date and get into ministry earlier, we’d be setting ourselves up to have to leave the field unexpectedly, arguably a much worse outcome than a delayed start.

Still, it’s irksome to have to answer that dreaded FAQ honestly, and that shows more about our hearts than about the realities of mission work. I want to give people a deadline so they’ll know the time to give is now; I want to give a deadline so they’ll believe it’s important for me to be on the field sooner rather than later – so they’ll know I’m important to the team we’re joining. I want to give people a deadline because I’m tired of raising support, and I want to will an end into sight; I want to give a deadline because I want to have the answers.

Mostly, I want to give people a deadline because the real answer is “When God wants us to go,” and that’s an answer that requires me to kill my desire to be seen as important, to be seen as successful, to be seen as having it together. And of course that’s what I need more than anything, which is perhaps the wisdom lurking behind requiring full funding before we can go to the field.

So: when do we leave? When God wants us to go.

-Ben