Last month, I had the privilege of going to the island Eleuthera, in the Bahamas to serve alongside about 35 high schoolers and adults from Grace Church. The trip was amazing. We got to spend time with a family from our church, The Fastzkies, who are living and serving in Eleuthera. We got contribute to a couple construction projects, putting roofs on a water cistern and medical clinic. We also got to put on a Bible School for the kids on the island.
As I said, the trip was amazing because of the people and the opportunities God opened up for us there, but it was special to me for another reason. This was my first trip out of the country since coming back from China.
While I was in China, we had several short term teams come to serve with us, so I was used to being the “longer term” person organizing the teams, preparing, and following up. The trip to the Bahamas was the first time I had been on the “other side” in several years, and the perspective God granted me in China really changed the way I viewed the trip.
I think on short term trips, it’s easy to view yourself and your time there as unimportant, because you’re not there long enough to make a difference. I know many times, this has been my attitude. But the thing is, and this is what I learned in China, God places you in specific places at specific times with specific people to do a specific task. It is our obedience in these specific things that bring glory to His name. It’s so difficult for us to really believe this, though, because we can’t see the whole picture. We can only see our miniscule snapshot. God knows the whole movie, though, and places us in our snapshot for a reason.
One night in small group, I felt like God wanted me to share what short-term teams look like from the “other side” and how much God can (and does) use short-term teams to make a big impact. So I shared the following story…
After being in China for about 5 months, a teammate and I made a trip to a friend’s home village. This friend was a new believer and already growing astonishingly in the Lord. This village was one we hadn’t planned on visiting at all because foreigners were not received well at all and had even recently been kicked out. We certainly were not well received there during this visit. While in the village, though, we visited the elementary school, where we discovered they had no clean water to drink. They drank out of filthy cistern, using a communal hose that stayed on the ground next to the cistern.
We agreed this was not ok, and if there was any way to fix this, we would. We immediately began brainstorming ideas and trying to find people to ask for help, since neither my teammate nor I were water purification/piping experts. As I talked to my dad about this, he decided he wanted to help. He contacted a friend who was involved in water purification in Africa, and the 3 of us began discussing how their bio-sand filters might work for us.
Five months later, my dad and stepmom were on a plane to China. We assembled all sorts of parts for our cistern/filter prototype, and headed to the village. During this trip, we were received fairly well in the village, and our language was coming along, which allowed us to communicate more. After completing the plastic prototype with my dad, we began discussing a permanent solution.
The next teammate that joined our team just happened to be the agriculture guy we needed. He came just weeks before a small team (4 construction workers) from SC came out to work with us. We quickly put them to work building a cistern with a bio-sand filter at a spring toward the top of the mountain. While they were working, my other teammate and I got to go in every class in the elementary school, give out toothbrushes and worm medicine, and tell them about the Great Physician.
Over the next year, we had several teams come to work on 2 other cisterns and pipe water from the first cistern to the school. Each team stayed for less than 2 weeks, but their contribution lasted much longer.
The more time we spent in the village, the more we were welcomed back. As we showed Christ’s love by meeting physical needs, the more their hard hearts opened to hearing about our true need. In the year and a half I spent making trips to this village, I saw 2 people accept Christ, and many more become open to dialoguing about Him. We also saw our friend, who first took us there, be empowered by the Holy Spirit with a boldness to share Christ that I’ve rarely seen in mature followers. And one of the people who chose to follow Christ was a young boy; the first male believer that we know of in that village.
I bet, though, that if you asked any of those short term teams about the impact they made there, they would talk about the cistern or pipe, and wouldn’t be so sure about the eternal impact. In the same way, if you ask us what impact we had in Eleuthera, we’d probably talk about the shingles on the roof or playing games with kids, not so sure about the kingdom impact.
That’s because we can only see the snapshot, not the whole movie. And the thing is the story I just shared with you is only a very few snapshots, maybe a frame of the movie. God was working in that village before we got there and continues to work once we’re gone, just as He was in Eleuthera before we got there and will be there once we leave. He doesn’t need to use us, but He chooses to. He gives us opportunities everyday to glorify Him through obedience wherever He happens to place us. But He always gives us the choice.
Listen to Him. Obey Him. Live out your snapshot for Him, and be confident that He works before, after, and in the midst of our snapshot. Because the movie isn’t about us. It’s about Him. He just loves us enough to include us in a snapshot.
*Picture from http://fashion.elle.com/blog/
