What About Him?
Peter’s the best, isn’t he? He gives us some great human moments, wrapped in an encounter with His Savior. We looked at this moment a few weeks ago, the one right after His resurrection, where Jesus shares an intimate moment with Peter on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. He restores the broken apostle, reinstates his calling, and gently reveals the high cost Peter will eventually pay to follow Him. He learns to fail, well.
It is a sacred, high-stakes moment of personal commission. But then Peter does something profoundly human. He turns, sees John walking behind them, and asks Jesus: “Lord, what about him?” (John 21:21).
In three short words, Peter shifts his focus away from his own calling to look at someone else’s assignment.
Jesus’ response is immediate and striking: “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me” (John 21:22).
For those of us serving on the global field, it is easy to slip into Peter’s posture. We quietly scan the room, measuring our capacity, our emotional resilience, our mental health, or our ministry fruit against another worker or team. We wonder why their soil seems to yield a faster harvest, why their team dynamics look smoother, or why they seem to navigate cross-cultural strain with far less weariness than we do.
When we indulge in this kind of comparison, we turn the Christian life into a standardized scorecard. We forget that the God who called us is the Sovereign Lord who uniquely crafts every story.
God’s providence assigns different burdens, different emotional capacities, different seasons of suffering, and different types of soil to every single one of His children. Weakness, mental fatigue, or serving in a slow, stony field is not a failure of faith. It is often the venue where God chooses to display His grace.
Scripture does not hand us a rigid formula to measure our worth against another person's journey. It gives us a grand, narrative framework centered on a Person.
Jesus does not evaluate your faithfulness by comparing it to your teammate's metrics. He does not ask you to carry another worker’s emotional load. He does not ask why you are not like them. He simply looks at you in the exact soil where He has placed you, with all your specific limitations, strengths, and human frailty, and says: “You follow Me.”
You can stop exhausting your soul by trying to manage or measure someone else’s assignment. Release the trap of comparison and rest in the specific story the Chief Shepherd is writing with your life.
-The MissioCare Collective Team