The most valuable thing you can bring with you on a short term mission trip is an open mind. Come without expectations. If you have any expectations, let them go. If you expected to be busy all the time, let it go. If you expected you would have certain foods, let it go. Open up your mind to the new and unknown. Open up your mind to be able to see that cultural differences aren’t wrong. Their way of doing things may be different that ours, but it is not wrong, just different. Open up your mind to what God wants you to learn. Even if you are miserable, even if you get sick and can’t even get out of bed, God still has brought you for a reason and wants to teach you many things. Before doing anything else, right now, take a few moments to think of expectations you may have had, and release them to God, let them go. Ask Him to open up your mind to learn and to be open to receive and be teachable.
The second most valuable thing you can bring is a willing heart. We are not called to go on missions trips to stay in 5-star hotels. We are not called to go on missions trips to refuse to clear the table, wash the dishes, clean the bathroom, pick up trash. We must be open and willing to go lower still in the upside down kingdom of God. If we normally don’t pick up trash around our yard or in our street, and at a place we visit, we are told they need us to pick up trash, we don’t complain about it or make a scene. We do it, and do it willingly. When there is a chore around the places we visit that we see really needs to be done, we do it. Or we ask someone if we can do it, and ask someone how a local would do the chore. There are very different ways to clean in different parts of the world. We step in and fill in the gaps, we go lower and lower until we feel we can go no lower, and still, we might be called to sit in a garbage dump with people dying of communicable disease, we go there and go lower still.
The third most important thing to remember on a short-term mission trip is that you are only there for a short amount of time. Whether it is a week, two weeks, a month, or even six months, after your set time there, you will go home, and those you have worked with and ministered to, will remain where you met them, where you saw them. You cannot change everything on a short-term trip. You cannot take people out of the poverty situations they are in, in most cases. That is the job of the local church and long-term missionaries. Many places people visit on short-term trips, such as daycares, children’s homes, hospitals, and neighborhoods, have regular ministries that work with the people there on a regular basis. These ministries welcome extra short-term help for a bit of respite, but the people at the places you will visit are not without other help after you leave, unless, for example, you go in with a team to break ground in a previously unreached village. But, even then, a pastor will be sent back there to work with the people since the short-term work had broken ground for a pastor to go in.
Along the same lines, know, you cannot change culture in two weeks. We can act within the bounds of the culture of the kingdom of God, we can show the people that there is another way, but there are things that we cannot change. One example is, in many parts of the world, dogs are treated horribly, they are kicked and chased away, and even killed, for no reason. We cannot change what other people do, how they treat the dogs, but we can show them what is the proper was to treat a dog, and to not kick the dogs or throw rocks at them. We can kindly tell someone we see kicking a dog, to be more gentle, but we cannot make them listen or make them change.
The fifth most important thing to remember is that, no matter how you feel, you are still a foreigner. Foreigners attract attention. They do at first, they do when they speak the language, they do even after years of living in a place. You can minimize how foreign you look by copying the dress of the people around you. But there are things that will make you look foreign no matter what- your hairstyle, your skin color, the color of your eyes, the way you walk. It is amazing to realize that people in different parts of the world actually walk different, the way they move their hips and thighs to walk, is different.
The last thing to remember is that smiles and prayer are two universal languages. Oftentimes, prayers don’t need to be directly translated. You can pray for someone in whatever language you like. Unless specifically asked by someone to translate a prayer, it is usually unnecessary. What people should be able to tell from prayers, above anything else, is your love for them. Smiles, as well, are also universal, except in Russia. Smiling at a child living in a slum, smiling at a woman who has been abused, smiling at an old man suffering from back pain, will brighten their day. It shows you like them, shows you care about them. Before anyone will accept Jesus, they must first accept his representative on earth, and that is us that they must accept. We win their acceptance by eating with them, eating the same way as them, eating the same food as them. We gain their acceptance by learning how to do the common chores they do, by singing the same songs as them, by finding out about their culture and customs. Before we can win the privilege of winning them to Jesus, we must win them to ourselves, to show love without using words, to show love in every way imaginable. Our love should be the most visible thing in our lives.
