Supplements

Commentary

By Liz Quirin

Open to a 'Mission' from God

I spoke with a mother on the phone the other day about how her son could go on a mission trip. Over the years I have given my children various opportunities to visit the missions, even sometimes when they weren’t keen on the idea of going to a “developing nation.” I, of course, had a hidden agenda, knowing that most of the development would be coming their way. Now that they’re both grown and living on their own, they actually admitted appreciating the opportunity to meet people of other cultures and to learn about their lives and their needs on their terms, not on American terms.

After reading “The Ugly American” so many years ago, I was embarrassed for some of my countrymen and women and the way they approached people whom they did not know nor could they understand. I have been gratified to find out over the years that I know far more people who want to know others, who take pleasure in learning about another country’s needs, and who don’t tromp arrogantly through another person’s traditions and customs wondering why “those people” aren’t more like we are.

When we took a large group of people on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land more than 10 years ago, we wanted our folks to see more than holy sites, and the inside of churches. We wanted them to see, meet, interact with and learn from the “living stones” of the Holy Land, the Christian people who have more or less survived under conditions of “occupation” in the West Bank near Jerusalem. Oh, I’m not saying one group is all right and the other all wrong, but it used to be whenever anyone heard the word “Arab,” the next word to pop into mind was “terrorist.”

So, with some minor degree of trepidation — we arranged for our group of more than 50 people to be divided into small groups of three to five people and “go to lunch” with Arab Christians in their homes. It was only one lunch and didn’t last more than a few hours, but the meetings of two cultures was a subject of discussion among the American pilgrims for many weeks into the future. It was described as “one of the high points” of the trip by some of our pilgrims. Actually, the whole trip was memorable, each day holding a treasured memory for all of us.

So, when a mother asks about finding a “mission trip” for her son, I can well understand what she wants to do and why, but these days, every time I think I have a place I can recommend, I realize that those places where I sent my children, where we took our people, are much more dangerous now than they were when I last visited them.
That doesn’t mean someone who wants to experience another culture, meet people who don’t have the same opportunities as we or our children do, should give up. It just means we have to look harder, spend more time finding out how to make meaningful experiences available to children and anyone else who would be open to one of God’s adventures.