It's well past time for updates from West Asia.
Here's what I want you to think: I'm an awesome leader, I have everything figured out and this was the most positive and visibly productive experience of my life so far.
Here's reality: none of the above.
Now, it will take a little time to unravel exactly what I mean by this, but let me start with the concept of community, a core value to how we approached this trip.
The idea is that we can't live out a genuine encounter with the gospel of Jesus in isolation, that the Kingdom of God requires relationship and that this is especially important in bringing the message of Jesus overseas. People have begun to look at the shallow, lifeless, bourgeois, pseudo-business system that we often call church and ask some good questions. Maybe somewhere along the line American culture got it wrong by proclaiming "rugged individualism." Maybe we aren't meant to be so alone. Maybe we actually do need each other. This is profoundly true. We are beginning to see that as the Body of Christ in America are missing something vital, and to take some steps to make big changes. That's really, really good.
However, often when the rubber of community meets the road of life the tire explodes. As a leader you start out thinking you're simply supposed to drive the mini-bus to Destination A and instead you end up changing a lot of flat tires and seeming to get nowhere.
It's hard enough learning to live this value out in our own culture, but when you take a team of people from totally different ages, genders, lifestyles and backgrounds, put them on a team and jet them to another location it all becomes only 100 times more apparent how little we really know about "life together."
We don't understand each other. Honestly, we're so entrenched in our own points of view, so comfortable doing things on our own, so used to leaving behind anyone who can't keep up that we don't even realize how self-centered and myopic we are.
Before you hear me saying this about OTHER people, you should know I'm really referring to myself. I don't know how to listen, or how to truly be open to the input of others in my life. I don't know how to trust or how to consistently lay myself aside and serve others. I don't know how to place myself in the context of community, how to live and work with other people. It's scary, and it hurts.
But also don't hear me saying this is only about me; this applies to pretty much all of us. Living life with other fallen people is hard. Doing missions on a team of people committed to this is even more difficult. You don't get a free pass on conflict because you signed up for missions. Honestly, you really just signed up for conflict on a whole new level.
It's a pretty thought that we're all doing this for God not for us, so it will just "happen". The truth is, it's going to be a lot of work. A lot of really hard, really painful, really humbling work. People are messy. People who know Jesus are messy and people who don't know Jesus are messy. We require a lot of grace and we're not always sure how to extend that grace to each other.
I suppose that's all I really want to say for now. Don't expect life together to be sanitized and orderly. Don't expect mission trips to be neatly packaged experiences of adventure and victory. But don't expect God to be thwarted by our messiness. He's still God.
