Mission away / Mission at home

I’ve been on two trips in the last few weeks: Two separate “mission” trips—one to the Twin Cities, serving alongside an inter-generational crew for a couple days in St. Paul and Eagan, and one to northern Idaho serving alongside sixteen youth and 6 adults at a camp for kids (and adults) with special needs. These trips are inevitably the highlight of my year every year. I don’t have to go on these trips; I get to go on them. And they just so happen to be the A#1 time I get to see progress in the life of faith among people whom I pastor. They are incredibly rewarding: spiritually, emotionally, and also professionally. I have few metrics by which to reliably measure my performance as pastor, but these trips allow me to feel like I’m doing something right, which I need more often than I admit.

            There are also tremendous needs for service at home. This is very true. And I hear somewhat frequently about how we should be doing more for people in our own backyards (sometimes with the implication that these trips to other places are unnecessary). We absolutely do need to be helping people here in Kittson County more than we do, but the more I go on these trips the more I realize there is absolutely no substitute locally for what we experience outside of this place. Part of spiritual and emotional growth requires leaving our bubble of safety and comfort behind.

            This is also where we discover the big secret about serving other people: When we serve others we often make less difference in their lives than they make in ours. Jesus came to serve, not to be served, because the path to a good and meaningful life is being the server not the one being served. This is why so many people who receive something—food from the food pantry, rehabilitation from addiction, meals when a loved one dies—spend their time trying to pay that gift forward when things are settled again. When we receive some unmerited gift we feel compelled to give back, and the biggest unmerited gift was Jesus dying on the cross for us so that we might have salvation, and so our entire lives are spent living in response to that grace. Service is part of who we are. You might say it is all that we are.

            However, it becomes easy to forget about this when we’re in a place that is stable. Mission is challenging because, intergenerational mission trips aside, so many of you are in different places in life. If you’re reading this on a paper copy of the newsletter you may be at a point in life where serving people far away is impossible or at least it would present many substantial difficulties. And, yet, you have the same desire within you to serve. So how will you push yourself out of that comfort zone? Where is your growing edge where you will find meaning you never knew existed?

            Then there are those who will be reading this online. You’re mostly a different demographic—younger, perhaps, but possibly with young children or grown children but imagining that since youth mission trips have passed you by there might not be a ready substitute. Still, the question remains: How might you be part of one? Because people in their 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s need to push themselves too—many more than they realize, many in addition to the outside factors that make life so busy. In fact, I find mission to be the one sure antidote to being busy.

            This is tricky stuff because mission is great—service is great—but it’s only as great as the opportunities we create for it to work in us. We don’t get enough of these opportunities—they’re costly, they take a big investment of time and money and resources. And, yet, we can’t get by as church without them, because the Christian church in 21^st century America has to seek out opportunities to serve in ways our parents and grandparents didn’t. We have to find meaning that is deeper than the next Pokémon we catch or our coffee-time discussions about nothing. We have a big growing edge to explore and mission allows us to explore that edge. All of us should be invested in that. And, more than that, we should be imagining ways we can bring that mission home—for our youth, yes, but for our adults and families and everybody else. We were all created to serve.