People say it changes you to go on a missions trip. They’re right. Although as I reflect on what it means to be changed, I suspect that might be the wrong word. Wrecked is more accurate. It really does wreck you, this whole missions thing.
There’s a part of you that gets left behind when you leave a mission field. I don’t really feel whole anymore in the way I did before. I guess it’s because I know what’s out there in a much more personal, tangible way. I can close my eyes and see the high mountains of Peru. I can breathe deep and imagine the smell of rain falling in Mexico’s Copper Canyon. I can slide my tongue on the roof of my mouth and taste the fresh cooked fish in Ecuador. In the silence, I can hear the sound of worshipers in the open-air church in Haiti.
Once you can see a people that live in need, and hear the cries of a school teacher as she laments the life of her students, and smell the stench rising from the dump where salvaging is a way of life, and touch the hands of a servant of God, and taste of the life that abject poverty brings, it’s hard to shake out of your senses when you come back home.
My head has has been filled with these places, these people. And my life – a life pieced together with comfort and convenience – seems less than what it was before. The smells and sights and sounds of my life seem more an echo than the real thing now that I know what is beyond my own little comfortable world. And it takes me apart to know that my world is so much smaller than I once thought.
My senses have been wrecked. And I praise God for it.
Heal my heart and make it clean
Open up my eyes to the things unseen
Show me how to love like you have loved me
Break my heart for what breaks yours
Everything I am for your kingdom’s cause
As I walk from earth into eternity
- from ‘Hosanna’ by Hillsong United
This brought tears to my eyes – it is so true!! Thank you for sharing this!
great honest beautiful prose
It sounds like you are beginning to see the world through the eyes of Jesus. I praise God for your lives that are being transformed by these experiences.
Thank you for your kind comments.