My Date with a Missionary—A Night I Will Never Forget

If you have ever entered the world of dating, you know it is a wild and wacky world. Some dates are anything but memorable. Others, you would pay any price to forget.

The date I will remember for the rest of my life was with a missionary—but not for the reasons you might expect. Maybe I’m wrong about that. You be the judge.

When I was growing up, my folks were very close with a missionary family. They were Bible translators working in Papua New Guinea. Because they had a son about my age, they decided to sort of stick us together when we reached our early 20s—just to see what might happen. So typical.

We were wise to their sneaky little scheme, though. Realizing we would never dodge this thing, we hatched a plan for a nice dinner and a movie to make it “date-worthy” and just have fun with it.

In the end, we actually had a great time over dinner. He kept me laughing, trying to teach me some of the native tongue. If I had a video of this, we could be looking at some serious YouTube money—hysterical! I only wish I could remember the bits he shared because I actually mastered a few lines. Well, let’s be honest, it was probably more like a word or two at most.

But then came the car ride home.

The thing that’s etched forever in my brain is the expression he had on his face during the ride home. I kid you not—it was as if an 18-wheeler had just crushed his beloved cocker spaniel. It was a look of deep sadness—plus something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

So I kept pressing him until he admitted it had been the movie.

He said it really disturbed him to see that type of thing portrayed on the screen, and it was even worse that it didn’t seem to bother anyone.

I was in shock.

The movie was HouseSitter with Goldie Hawn. It was a comedy—PG, not R-rated or anything. Okay, I could see that some aspects of it were anything but Christian, but it was a secular movie. We knew that going in, and it was at least marginally funny. Steve Martin, right? Tame by today’s standards anyway.

To him—not so much.

It was extremely dishonest, immoral, and even repulsive.

I remember thinking something along the lines of, Man, just relax. It was supposed to be silly. Don’t take everything so seriously. You probably just need to get out more.

But later, I started to really think about it.

I kept thinking about it, and it dawned on me that there was a significant truth here that needed to be revealed about our very skewed perceptions.

I started to consider what must be a horror to God in comparison to what seems relatively harmless to us. Here we live in a world that is in direct conflict with God’s laws, yet we are constantly being desensitized—day after day, for years.

Dishonesty, deception, betrayal, manipulation, lust, fear, greed, anger, clamor, slander—the list goes on and on. It’s all the stuff the Bible says to put away from us (Ephesians 4:31), yet we expose ourselves to it all the time—at the very minimum, on a screen.

No wonder my missionary friend was so appalled!

For someone who had been overseas, working to translate an obscure language for years—spending his hours sweating away, witnessing to the natives—he was sheltered from that relentless onslaught. So he was duly and quite appropriately shocked.

And that’s the bottom line when you really spell it out.

It’s the shock that is correct—not the acceptance.

We have it all backward, but we are often too blind to even blink in awareness of this reality.

I’ve noticed in my own life that when I went through my big valley—what I used to call my journey from fear to faith—I stepped back from TV, social activities, and everything else that used to distract me. Instead, I started digging into God’s Word.

I had never reached for God at that level before.

I spent literally hours a day in study—sometimes from morning till night—saturating myself with input from various sources. I couldn’t get enough and still can’t. I never thought I would even want all that, and that’s a testimony all its own.

The fascinating thing that relates to my date story is how much this changed my perspective. Not just my closeness to God—but my sensitivity to my surroundings.

I became more sensitive to my own sin and to the stuff that previously didn’t even make me pause for thought.

I’m not in my missionary friend’s class by a long shot, but how ironic to look back at that experience from so many years ago and finally get a better picture of what he was feeling.

I sat down to a movie a friend wanted to watch a few weeks after that experience and couldn’t even sit through it.

It just wasn’t funny to me anymore.

I was seeing it through a different filter. I knew more. I realized more. And the whole thing actually saddened me.

The smushed cocker spaniel face was now mine.

I wrote this story many years ago—at least ten.

I considered rewriting it to add perspective, considering how much my faith journey has developed since then. But I decided to leave it in its original form.

What I can tell you is this: I see more than ever how crucial it is to be intentional about where we place our focus.

The truth is, we forget things so easily. If we are not vigilant, we can drift away from our deepest convictions.

Jesus made it clear:

“Everyone who hears these words of Mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock…” (Matthew 7:24-25).

Let that be you. Stay anchored. Stay rooted. Stay grounded in Him.

And when the winds blow?

You will stand.

🎧 Prefer to listen instead? You can hear the audio recording of this article on YouTube here.