As I was sitting in a trash village a few days ago, the thought came to me that missionary life is far too over-romanticized.
When high school kids leave from my home church for just a week-long mission, they get so fired up about going to serve and love on people. They go and the whole trip is so full of doing and being on a “Jesus high.” They come back from a week-long trip, feeling so full and ready to take on the world for Jesus. Now, I am in no way bashing week-long missions; they are so good and so important. I’m just saying that week-long missions make being a missionary look so romantic.
What I mean by this is that everyone expects a missionary to be doing and doing and doing, but a lot of the time it is spending time with God and learning more about His heart.
I think I finally felt like I was a missionary when I was in Nepal, walking through the rice fields. We walked for hours sometimes just to get to one village. Again, here in Cambodia, we take a roofless vehicle made of 4×4’s, and pulled by a motorbike to a dirt road. Once we get to a certain point in the road, the moto won’t go any longer, we walk the rest of the way to the village. As silly as it sounds, to me, it’s been in the walking to the villages that I’m reminded that, wow, I am a missionary.
In the garbage village that I alluded to earlier, I really felt like I had the wrong impression of a missionary up until that point. I remembered back to when I did week-long missions in high school. I remember playing basketball with kids in Jamaica and taking pictures with smiling children in Africa. But, here we were in a village where people were living in garbage. The adults did their best to smile at us to hide what’s underneath. The little kids had tough lives that didn’t get any easier… ever.
Being on a longer mission trip, (I’m now on month five) I’ve gotten past the honeymoon period of being away from home. I’ve really learned that it is so important to lean on God to do the impossible. The initial joy of holding kids and singing songs has turned into a heart overflowing with pain for God’s children.
We romanticize about how missionary life is so holy. We romanticize about how being a missionary is so great because it makes you feel so good about yourself. I want to encourage anyone who has those thoughts to join the world race. Get on a long-term mission trip and see how God tugs at your heart. It’s beautiful and it’s sad. I’m not complaining, because I absolutely love being here and doing what I’m doing. I’ve loved the way that God has been working in me to learn how to love better. I just want to destroy the idol that we’ve made of mission trips. They are beautiful, but they have been far too over-romanticized.
