Thursday's Thought-Short-Term High

The short-term missions trip. It’s a favorite of Christians everywhere— a chance to see the world, serve the poor, and come home a week later able to sleep better at night because of the feeling that you’ve made a positive difference in the world and the fact that you are once again in your own bed, knowing you can sleep in tomorrow morning.

But what if we’re missing something? What if there’s something more to Christian service than an artificially induced one-week spiritual high which in the long run leaves you discouraged because you always dream of going back and having it like it was for that week? What if love for our neighbors isn’t supposed to inspire us to just give a week and care enough to take some pictures to show to our friends back home? What if truly loving the poor and oppressed in the world, or just our everyday neighbors, involves actually getting involved in their lives personally? What if rather than traveling far away to serve the people in another part of the world for a week, we got involved with the people in our own neighborhoods, and in such a way that they were able to see that we truly cared about them as individuals and not just as photo-ops?

Yes, there is a reason I am writing this. I have realized that I am as much of a sucker as the next guy for the short-term missions trip movement. And, oh by the way, I’m going on one next week, so maybe I’m just writing this post to myself, but as I have taken time to truly invest in the lives of those around me here in Hong Kong over the past few months, I have noticed something. Living here is not like the short-term missions trips I’ve been on before. When one of my youth come to me and tell me about a problem they’re facing, I don’t have the luxury of telling them, “I’m sorry,” and “I’ll pray for you,” and then packing up and leaving two days later. When one of them comes to me with a problem, I have two options—either I personally step into their lives, into the uncomfortableness and dirtiness of what they’re dealing with and demonstrate to them that I truly love them, or I don’t step in and therefore prove through my actions that I truly don’t care about their problems. There is no easy-exit contingency plan where I can maintain the appearance of caring for the individual without getting involved in their problem. At times it is inconvenient and frustrating, but the experience has taught me something that I never could have learned through a short-term missions trip—true love and true ministry don’t happen over a week’s time, they happen over a lifetime. And while the “spiritual high” of the short-term trip is always exciting as long as it lasts (which is never as long as you’d expect it to), the tough day-in and day-out struggle of truly investing in the lives of those around you leaves a much more satisfying and long-lasting feeling at the end of the day.

So where does this leave me? I’m definitely still going to the Philippines next week. My primary motivation for going, as strange as it may seem, is not a desire to serve the ministry we are going to work with (although that is there as a secondary motivation), but rather to continue investing into the lives of the Hong Kong students who will be going on the trip, because they are the ones I get to live life with. They are the ones that will still be around when we get back to Hong Kong. This means I will work my butt off to serve KIM, both out of a desire to serve KIM and out of a desire to set a godly example for the youth from International Christian School who will be going on the trip as well. But it also means that the trip doesn’t end when we get back to Hong Kong. It will last as long as I’m here.