A Word from Vanessa

Vanessa wrote this article last quarter and I thought she was going to share it so that family and friends could read it, but she's so busy lately the blog is sadly neglected. I am sure Jason and Antionette will enjoy it. And yes, it does mention adoption - and that is what this blog is about, so it fits. Enjoy!                                                       

Mission Trips

 A few years ago, a group of several families from my church was preparing for a mission trip to Tanzania, Africa. Like any other mission trip, it included a lot of fundraising, working, and saving before embarking on the adventure. About that time, someone, promoting a mission project in a different part of Africa, came asking for help for their project, but she said specifically that they did not want short term mission trips. She felt that mission trips spent so much money that could be used more efficiently to help the needy if people would just send it to the missionaries already in third world countries. Her argument at first seemed reasonable, and it made many wonder if short term mission trips were a worthwhile cause. Sadly, her view of short term mission trips is not singular. Others are questioning whether short term mission trips should be supported. After considering this challenge to the importance of short term mission trips, I still believe that in the big picture mission trips are essential. The experience gained by those who go on a mission trip has far reaching effects that can impact both those who go and those in need for years afterward.

 Those wondering whether mission trips are a legitimate and worthwhile endeavor are concerned mainly because of the extreme financial costs involved. Critics point out that mission trips cost thousands of dollars to help out with a job that would cost only a fraction of the money if sent to workers already in the mission field. Looking at the expenses in this light makes mission trips look like a stupendous waste of resources, yet this mentality fails to look at the bigger implications of mission trips.

Mission trips are a way for people to connect with those in need, to understand their needs in a mutual way. This is important. Everyone has heard that there are poverty stricken countries in the world. Most people understand, at least intellectually, that there are people who don’t have enough food, that there are children without homes, and that people die every day from lack of treatment in third world countries. It seems, though, that this knowledge has become too general. While sheltered in the comforts and securities of their homes, people are numb to the desperation of the needy. This isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault. It’s just that the suffering of the needy is so far away, and we don’t see it in real life every day. This is exactly why mission trips are so important.  Short term mission trips make the needs of others real to us. They show us that the suffering people in the world are real. They are the babies we held, the children we played with, and the people we laughed with. When these relationships are made, we realize that it’s not okay that they are starving, dying of AIDS, or begging on the streets living from one day to the next without hope; it’s not okay because they are our friends. When the needs of the real world become personal, it drives us to help, to take action, to do something. This is what mission trips are all about. Yes, they give already established missions help with building projects and evangelistic efforts, but if that was all these trips accomplished than I would certainly agree that simply donating the money to those already in the mission field would be a more useful contribution. But mission trips have lasting impacts. Seeing, touching, and loving the people who have so little yet are so thankful makes giving to them a necessity. Living with less becomes easier and sacrificing for others so much more essential. The mission trip is an investment that results in later financial aid for missions and the needy because people want to give when they are connected with those in need. After they have actually gone, seen, and felt those needs they will give- sometimes in extraordinary ways.

If mission trips are such an important investment, then why not just volunteer and serve closer to home? Sharing with the people in our own towns and in our country is vital, but somehow we don’t seem to notice these people, and sometimes it takes going on a foreign mission trip to open our eyes to the needs close by. This might seem like a strange theory except that mission trips make us relook at our priorities. The needs in foreign countries are desperate. Maybe it’s because they have less technology and distractions that bombard our minds at home, or maybe it’s just being away from our everyday ‘normal’ routines, but on short term mission trips we can’t help but see poverty in almost every direction. It screams into our dull minds that need is real.  When we return home, this vivid picture of desperation doesn’t leave us, and we begin to notice the needs of others at home. We are inspired to help not only the needy in faraway places but the local as well.

That’s what our mission trip did for us. When we came home from Tanzania back in December of 2008, we knew that we must do something more for God and others than we were already doing. Three of our families that went applied to adoption agencies, and a year later, we had brought home children from Africa, China, and even from our own state. In comparison with the great need in the world, the impact that taking in these children made seems very small, yet it has made the world of difference for these kids. This adoption journey has been long and hard for all of us. It has stretched our characters until we’ve felt unable to be stretched anymore, yet it’s from this journey that we have learned and grown. It is undeniable that the impact of our mission trip has been life changing for us.

This life changing impact is not singular to our group. Take Katie as an example. She went on her first mission trip when she graduated from high school. It made such an impression on her that she went back to stay at nineteen years old.  She began a child sponsorship program that sends children to school and provides food for them every day. Now, Katie has taken in fourteen girls as her own. She cares for the sick, delivers babies, feeds whole villages of starving people, and holds Bible studies for the people. She lives passionately for them doing far more than most people do in their lifetimes, and it started with a short term mission trip. She wrote on her blog a couple months ago, “Poverty, and squalor, and disease, and desolation are REAL. They have names, and faces that stare back, and hands that squeeze mine tight. They are beautiful people in need of REAL love.” Katie is amazing, but hers is not a singular experience. She and so many other people have chosen to do this great work because the needs of others have become real and personal to them. If people like Katie didn’t have the opportunity to see the needs of the world in real life, and if they didn’t see the for themselves the work that missionaries do full time to relieve the suffering of others and give them hope, then would they  choose to dedicate their lives to helping these needy ones? Would there be missionaries in the future?

It’s a reoccurring theme. Mission trips impact those who go. Serving changes our perspectives from looking at ourselves to looking at the needs of others. It changes our motivations and our attitudes- how we look at life.  We realize how little so many people have, how hard they work to survive, and how thankful they are. It makes it hard for us to complain when our life at home is made so easy by things like running water, ovens, stoves, laundry machines, and motor run plows. On foreign mission trips, we learn how these people live. We have the privilege to work right alongside them. One young man that stands out in my mind as representing the need and kind hospitality, the poverty and yet the gratefulness of these people is a boy named Alex. Although his parents lived faraway he stayed with his grandmother to take care of her. He was a leader of the scores of children in the village. He was bright, friendly and very interested in these white visitors in his village. We made very good friends with Alex. He would come over with the many other boys and play soccer with us; he came to church and would come around to help us work on our building project. Close to before we left, he brought us to his home to meet his grandmother. His home was a tiny dilapidated mud brick hut. Smoke, from the cooking fire, fused from inside. They had very little except for his prized possession- a guinea pig. Alex’s grandmother was old and frail, but she was happy and greeted us warmly. They both were so thankful despite their need. We will never be able to push memories like these away. These people are our friends, and these friendships have made us thankful for what we have and more thankful for what we can give.

 When talking to my uncle, a full time missionary and a head mission trip and evangelism coordinator in Tanzania Africa, about why he felt that organizing church mission trips is so important, he said that mission trips are for the people that go and their churches back home. The experiences that those who go on mission trips gain are definitely spread. When those who have gone come back to their churches and share their experiences, how they’ve grown, what they’ve seen, and just the needs of the mission field in general, it inspires and strengthens everyone’s faith and urges them to do more to help. The church will as a whole give more to the needy and those working in full time missions.

Short term mission trips are an investment. Their impact has an effect for years afterward, and they touch not only the lives of those who go on one or those who are helped by one. They speak to people who have not had the opportunity to go. Short term mission trips must be encouraged. By these, the funds, the missionaries, and the hearts to help will continue to grow.
Vanessa Ford* . English 101 . Response Paper . 12-03-10