If you’re around me when I get back to the States, please don’t ask me to run a load of clothes. I don’t think I can remember how to use a washing machine.
Maybe it’s the idea of wearing clean clothes that I can’t process anymore. Heck, why should I bother taking a shower?
I’m in Kenya and I’m 100+ days into this Race. We don’t have clean drinking water, a washer or a coffee maker.
That sounds like I’m complaining. Sadly, I think I am. Wouldn’t you be?
I miss making coffee in a coffee maker and having it taste like…coffee. I miss cleaning with bleach.
I make choices every day here strikingly similar to the choices I made in America—and I’m in AFRICA. I try to get enough sleep, get enough to eat and get enough rest to make it through the day. I help people and pray for people when I have the energy.
I constantly choose—even while I’m in the Land of the Lion King—to be satisfied physically and emotionally. I make my choices based on comfort. And, to be honest, Africa isn’t exactly a comfortable place.
The entire motivation for finding myself in Kenya in the first place was for one man: Jesus.
It’s strange to me how I can travel halfway across the world and find my motivations and desires to be identical to what they were while I was in America. Mission trips don’t change people’s hearts. Or desires. Or motivations.
Mission trips simply get missionaries abroad. If any change is going to occur, Jesus is the only way it’ll happen.
I wish I were a better person. But, the truth is this mission trip hasn’t changed me—it has provided different opportunities than I would have had at home. But, the girl I was at home is the girl I am abroad. Instead of working at a church, I work the streets of Kenya—telling people about Jesus.
I’m still the same girl. I still want JIFF peanut butter and Hazelnut creamer. I don’t want to be swarmed by ants in Africa or be threatened daily with malaria-infected mosquitoes. Remember, I’m just Ashley.
I’m writing this blog as a sort of warning to myself and any other future short-term or long-term missionary. No country, people or culture will change your desires to make Jesus known. What you do in America is what you will do in Africa, Asia and South America.
Because, let’s face it: the only good in us is Jesus. And if we aren’t drinking deeply in the grace of Jesus Christ at home, we won’t do it more in Africa. Because Africa isn’t the answer. Or the right motivation. Or the right desire.
No one, including Jesus, will applaud us for going on a mission trip. The trip isn’t the point—Jesus is. And if I don’t come to understand this simple truth, I will come home with a false sense of victory for what I’ve accomplished.
If we aren’t daily choosing to let Jesus in—to let Him complicate our plans, let Him force us into deeper relationship with people we probably don’t want to be in relationship with, or let Him shake up our reality—then we won’t be any better off by going to another country in the hopes of “doing missions.”
Because, at the end of the day, life isn’t about JIFF peanut butter. Or clean outfits.
It’s about Jesus. Plus nothing.
