why go short term?

For those of you that weren't there or haven't yet heard, the theme of Urbana was based off of John 1:14, which states: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." With that in mind, they challenged us to follow the incarnational model of missions. Mozilla's red dotted line tells me "incarnational" isn't even a word, so what does it mean? The intuitively obvious answer is missions that hold Jesus' incarnation as the golden standard. Okay... but what does that mean for those of us going on missions, especially overseas?

In a fashion similar to the way Jesus stepped down onto earth from heaven, incarnation means we have to step down from these lofty thrones that we've been sitting on for most of our lives. One missionary described his home among the poor in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It stood on stilts and in order to get in, you had to climb an old, wooden ladder. That also meant that in order to interact with the other members of the community, he had to climb down that ladder. All too often as missionaries, I think we're willing to relocate and surround ourselves with the poor, but very rarely are we willing to surrender all our comfort and security to actually live among the poor. It reminds me of a summer when I went to China for an ESL camp. They placed all the American volunteers in the international student dorms, which were essentially 4-star hotel rooms. Meanwhile, up to six Chinese students and even the teaching assistants shared a small, dirty room apart from the communal showers. It bothered me then, and it bothered me even more as I learned more about the incarnation model for ministry. It isn't enough to just surround ourselves in the mess of other people's lives; we have to walk through it with them.

But if we're going to be really serious about intertwining our own lives with their lives, then doesn't incarnation call into question the heart and usefulness of short-term missions? I shared this quote a little less than a year ago, but the message always resonates deeply with me:

"You Westerners, you come here and tell us about Jesus. You can stay for
a year or two, and your conscience will feel good, and then you can go away.
Your Jesus will call you to other work back home...some of you can raise a lot
of money on behalf of us underpriveleged people. But you'll still be living in
your nice houses...and we'll still be living here. What you are doing really has
nothing to do with us. You'll go home anyhow, sooner or later...[You] can sing
about love very nicely, but what do they know about us? They don't touch
us - they know nothing."

As I learned more and more about incarnation, I wondered, "Don't short-term missions, then, show a basic unwillingness to truly share life with the poor?" It's sad, but it's true-- what the Chinese gang member states in the above quote. It's almost easy to go short-term, because we know that when we come back we will find a soft bed, a clean home, and running water. But what do we know about the poor, the hopeless, the abandoned? And so, for most of the conference, I wrestled with the idea of going short-term in light of all I had heard about incarnational missions. I knew it wasn't true that the two were incompatible, but for some time I had trouble reconciling the two. How can I say that I want to live life with these people and stay for such a limited amount of time? This was really difficult for me, because a month earlier I had already decided that I would dedicate my upcoming summer to God.

By Wednesday evening, I still didn't understand how short term missions fit into the model of incarnation. As I stared at the commitment card before me, all I knew was that I still wanted to go short-term, as well as long term. I seemed like the kind of person that went to Urbana, already eager to check those boxes and sign my name. But after the first two days, I was about as far from making a commitment as I could possibly get. I wanted my yes to be a yes and I was afraid that in the midst of all the excitement I would make a commitment I wasn't ready to make. But by God's grace, in response to prayer from some good friends back home, I was able to fill out that commitment card.

I felt at peace with the promise I had made, but a small part of me still wanted some confirmation from God about short-term missions. During my track session that night, God gave me that sense of confirmation. The speaker, Oscar Muriu, shared two points that really spoke to my heart and the doubts that I'd been having. The first point he made was don't come with answers-- come to learn. Instead, he said, we should go just to listen to God and to the people there (how ironic, that my blog is titled "just listen"). All too often we go on these trips and we want to fix things. But like a proper physician or an auto mechanic, we have to understand the problem first. Oscar advised us to just go and listen to the people in order to understand their lives, and their selves. His second point was: don't go to bring back results. We live in a very results-oriented society. If there are no visible results, then the project was a failure. Sadly, this mentality has tainted our view of missions, especially short-term. We go and we hope to come back to say that x number of persons were "saved." And yes, it's awesome and it's exciting and it's joyful to hear about people coming to Christ, but in all our eagerness to increase our conversion count, we often forget to foster a meaningful relationship with the people we minister to. We forget that before we can start preaching at people, we must simply love them.

I liked an analogy that my friend shared with me the other day. She told me that the decision (for a non-Christian) to become a Christian is like a balance, the kind they probably used back in Jesus' day. She told me that every life experience and every encounter with a Christian is like a pebble or some other source of weight that is added to the balance. Hopefully, the Christian encounters add more weight to the side in favor of accepting Christ. Eventually, she explained, there is that one Christian that can totally tip the balance and cause the non-Christian to believe in Jesus. It's true that that one Christian directly prompted the decision. However, without the pebbles that came before, that last pebble would not have been able to make a significant contribution. Short-term missionaries, then, are those pebbles that edge individuals a little bit closer to Jesus. (I am well aware of the flaws in this analogy, but you get the point.)

There have been times that I have begged God to call me overseas right then. It was never at the right time, and it might not be for several more years. But I'm okay with that now. I'm content in just helping to prepare the soil, where others will sow and reap. I'm content for now in going just to listen-- to what direction God wants me to take in life, to His symphony of love, to the hearts of the hurting.