I have a somewhat unapologetic distaste for personality tests. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the value of communicating well about our strengths and weaknesses, our needs and wants, however, I don’t like boxes. I would rather sit down and have a cafe con leche at a cute little cafe and chat face to face with someone than know their personality type (to which some of you are already responding in your heads, “How ENFP of you!” So, we will just have to agree to disagree on this one).
I feel similarly about this short term vs. long term missionary conversation. This 11 countries in 11 months journey that we are on doesn’t fit well into the short or long term missions category. We don’t really have a word for short term missionaries that come in to support long term missionaries repeatedly for a semi-long period of time. We could go back and forth all day long about the value/harm of short term missions…but that’s not really what I’m talking about at all. I’m talking about this missionary grey area in between short and long term missions — this unboxed territory I find myself in the middle of on this month three Tuesday morning.
I want to tell you about this unboxed territory out of desire to share my reality with you. My desire is not for you to figure out if the World Race is actually a short or long term missions organization, it’s not for you to come up with a new catchy term like mid-term missionary, it’s for you to understand a little more about what my dailiness looks like and for us to rejoice together in the messiness of the story sharing process.
It’s hard to be uprooted once a month. We pour our whole selves into people and a ministry for 30 days, we get on a bus, appear in a new country, and start the learning and relationship building process all over again. This rooting and uprooting process feels unnatural — like when you dive under a rolling ocean wave and hold your breath for that perfect amount of time and come up expecting to get a deep gulp of oxygen and are instead smashed in the face by another wave. My fellow wave divers can attest to this I’m sure. Yet, if you come up from the peaceful ocean floor and take a deep breath before diving under the next crashing wave, you can play in the waves for hours and hours without the salty lung and stinging eye reality that comes with a poorly timed dive.
We are in the third month of our 11 month journey, and I am just beginning to understand the rhythm of these waves. I’m learning when to dive in deep and when to come up for air. This month I kinda dove in sideways and got water up my nose. I’m learning that I can’t expect to be in the same place I was relationally with our hosts day 30 of last month when it’s day 4 of this month. I’m figuring out what it looks like to keep my daily rhythm with the Lord when there is no such thing as a typical daily routine. I’m learning how to play in the waves of this sort-of-short-but-kind-of-long term missionary life.
Some days I really don’t want to take an ice cold shower or do a seemingly insignificant task for what feels like four hours. Some days I just want to FaceTime my mom, or sit on my bed and write without feeling guilty for not being in the living room with everyone else. But that’s when I stop and think about why I’m pulling this string apart so my teammate can sew it into a bag, so that it can become part of the bean bag toss that Carlos will play with when he’s here at David and Scarleth’s house. This will lead to him opening up to them about what’s really going on in his heart, which will lead to real life on life discipleship. That’s why I’m pulling this string apart.
