In an odd way, one of the most personally impacting moments of my most recent mission trips was the most unremarkable: swallowing a pill. At home, this is something I do without thinking. A multi-vitamin each day, Advil when aching, some herbal boosts when the immune system needs a jump start. But for a few days before, everyday while in Africa and then for a few extra days after returning home, I took Malaria medicine.
Everyone told me that the medicine that I was taking was the expensive one. I was warned that if my insurance didn’t cover it (it did), that it could cost a couple hundred dollars. As I took the single pill every day, I was keenly aware that I was ingesting a medicine that would very, very likely protect me from a disease that was literally killing millions of Africans each year. All because I had both health insurance and the means to afford it.
I was also keenly aware that these 21 pills cost what an African family makes in income in a year.
So, here I was, a short-term missionary in Africa protecting myself and my son at the cost of two years salary for an African. Meanwhile a million people die of Malaria every year, my missionary friends drank tonic water (for the small amounts of quinine) and told stories of what having Malaria is like. (One of the missionaries told of contracting the disease over 150 times.) What do I make of that?
I found myself looking up articles on Malaria, scanning websites; I even posted a blog report on Malaria day (with virtually no interest from any commentators). What certainly was off my radar before I went to Africa was now becoming a growing personal concern. One of the reasons that I supported the efforts of The ONE Campaign is because of Jeffrey Sach’s conviction that it will take a world-wide effort to make Malaria medicine and prevention available in Africa. (The same $7 mosquito net that we slept under around every bed in Africa would do more than most other treatments to slow the infection rate dramatically.)
Beyond Malaria and the means to make the medicines more readily available, what is clear is that I was now thinking, praying and reflecting about issues, world circumstances and people that I had rarely thought about before. According to one of the missiologists who corresponded in the recent Christianity Today articles, these very kinds of mission-field reflection hold more potential for long-term life transformation than just pondering the topic at home. (If “relationship” was the first “R” for truly transforming mission trips, then “reflection” is the second.)
“(Short Term Mission) provides a fertile setting for Christians to reflect on such things as witness, service, community, sacrifice, spirituality, poverty, materialism, suffering, hedonism, self-denial, justice, racism, ethnocentrism, inter-ethnic relations, globalization, stewardship, and vocation,” wrote Robert Priest of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. “I’ve been impressed that while STM may not automatically produce desired results, the right sorts of STM, carried out in the right sorts of way, and accompanied by the right sorts of reflections have potential for good.”
His colleague, Kurt Ver Beek agreed and at the same time, reiterated his conviction that the reflection begun on the mission field must continue at home.
“Monthly meetings with our groups after returning to the U.S. newsletters about the progress and needs of the people we visited, Bible studies on the country or theme of our trip, are just a few of the ideas that can translate a one-week experience into life-lasting changes in prayer, giving, and lifestyle. Sadly, very few STM experiences are currently emphasizing this sort of follow up. This is where I believe we should begin experimenting and see how STM participants are changed.”
These two professors would say that perhaps even more powerful than taking Malaria medicine was my now far more conscious awareness of what it means that I CAN take Malaria medication. Also, the fact that the medicine I took required me to continue the doses even when I returned home, encouraged my reflections for a few days after the trip.
In my case, my family and I went to the rainforest of Belize three weeks after I returned from Africa. We were once again on the same Malaria medication and this time taking it for another 21 days. If nothing else, the “physical discipline” of the taking a pill became a “spiritual discipline” of lingering longer on the thin line between the security and medication available to me and my family making it possible to venture into many places in the world in the name of Christ where others are dying because they can’t venture out. And that is certainly worth reflecting on…
Next Post: The Third R--Reintegration
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