Pray for weary missionaries

Today I was reading in Spiritual Depression by Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones on his chapter based on Galatians 6:9, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” It is a fantastic chapter and one section especially stood out to me:

“This is what we may call the danger of the middle period. It is something which is true not only in the Christian life as such, it is true of the whole of life. It is the problem of middle life, and, if you like, of middle age. … It means that they have got beyond that stage of developing and building up and have attained to a certain level.  … There they are on the level, and the difficulty is to keep going on that level while lacking the stimulus that took them there. …This has often happened to a man in business, and he may sometimes find it much more difficult to maintain a business than it is to build it up. Everything seems to be with him in a sense when he is building it up, but it is when he arrives at that point and loses certain stimuli, that he finds it extremely difficult to hold the position. … This is the stage which follows the initial experience, that initial experience in which everything was new and surprising and wonderful and clear, the stage in which we were constantly making new discoveries which never seemed to come to an end. But suddenly we are conscious of the fact that they do seem to have come to an end, and now we have become accustomed to the Christian life. … So that all that thrill of new discovery which animated us in the early stages suddenly seems to have gone. … I am given to understand, and I know it is true, that this particular phenomenon happens to be one of the major problems in connection with foreign mission work, and missionaries who have spent time abroad will know exactly what I mean by the things I am saying. It is something that always tends to happen when we have got over the newness and the thrill and excitement of doing something that we have never done before, and we settle down into our routine, doing the same thing day after day. Then this trial arises, and we are no longer carried over it by that initial momentum which seemed to take us through it all in the early stages at the beginning.” (pp. 192-193, emphasis mine). (You can hear this sermon free at http://www.mljtrust.org/sermons/weary-in-well-doing/ )

Brothers and sisters, please pray for us and our teammates working with the Roma, that we would not become weary in doing good.