With this post, I hope to rescue my blog from the stagnation which has engulfed it the past couple of weeks. VBS last week really took a lot out of me: we were at the church or the nearby park from 8:30 in the morning to 8:30 at night, sometimes longer. And it was over 100 degrees every day, with no air conditioning outside of the pastor´s office. But that being said, I had another great week deepening my relationships with the people of Bethel Presbyterian Church and forging new relationships with the teams. One team of about eight hailed from Chattanooga (I think from First Presbyterian Church) and another of about seventeen from Muncy, Indiana. In the mornings, we ran a clinic at the local park that consisted of basketball drills, pick-up games, a couple short object lessons by the team members, and a couple hours of pick-up soccer. After lunch, we helped run the Campamento del Verano (VBS), which drew fifty to sixty image-bearers from the neighborhood. After a chaotic first day, I and the youth leader from Indiana took over the games and had a lot of fun with the kids. The final day, I gave an object lesson to the kids at the park in Spanish. Friday night, we had a despedido, or send-off, and the people of the church chose superlatives gave out little wrestler (luchador) trophies-- I got ¨best at Spanish,¨believe it or not. But I´m not content with my progress so far and hope to imprint much more Spanish on my brain in my last two weeks here.
This week, I´m working with a team from New Jersey who is doing VBS in the morning and building a concrete wall in the afternoon. Fortunately, I´ve been able to opt out of the manual labor, which is nice since my back still hasn´t recovered from an intense 2 weeks of nonstop disc golf in early May. But I´ve found myself in charge of about twenty fantastic nine- and ten-year-olds, and am really enjoying my time with them. In the afternoon, Michael Lee (a pastor with whom I´ve hung out a lot the past few weeks) and I head back to the house where we´re staying or figure out something to do. We have had some great talks and get along really well-- he´s an answer to prayer. Yesterday, we decided to go downtown to buy a couple soccer jerseys (which are really expensive here) and almost succeeded in getting lost. This afternoon, we´ve just been hanging out at the MTW office getting stuff done. The rest of the week looks about the same-- I hope to get lots of reading and Spanish study in.
The Medical Brigade comes in on Saturday and will open up their clinic back at Bethel on Monday (as far as I know). I´m really looking forward to meeting some doctors and nurses and hopefully getting a lot of hands-on (or at least eyes-on) experience. This type of work is really what I wanted to do all summer, but the Lord had his own plans. Pray both that I learn a lot of practical things and that I will also come to a better understanding of how medical missions works and whether I would be interested in doing some of it down the road.
As I near the end of my summer (I fly out on August 3rd and start medical school on August 10th), I am so thankful for a chance to see what missions is like first-hand. At times (especially on the off-weeks), it´s been very boring, and there are people I´ve met with whom I simply have nothing in common and with whom I would prefer not to be. On the flip side, last week I was stretched too thin, with no energy for reflection, mitigated desire for spiritual cultivation, and a reflexive neglect of the mind of Christ. Yet between these extremes, I have had stretches of days and even weeks where I´ve read great books every night then found myself on my knees, thanking God for His Spirit, praying for others, and asking for wisdom for decisions I face. Francis Shaeffer has been tugging my worldview back to a more Biblical place, Soren Kierkegaard has been showing me the despair that we all mask when we don´t submit to Christ, Dr. Abraham Verghese has been telling me about what it looks like to be an internist, and my buddy Kirk Norris (via his blog
The Kingdom in Thailand) has been showing me what it´s like to feel God´s call to missions in the midst of ministry yet experience the uncertainty of how to get there in this complicated world. Though for several reasons I have not experienced a call to be a missionary to a foreign land, I think I´m ready to minister to my neighbors over the next year, who will mostly be med students. It´s become trite to say that we´re all missionaries, but the fact is that we all have the same call placed upon us, and professional missionaries aren´t any more spiritual or any more obligated to share the Gospel than anyone who has submitted to Christ´s call. Yet my failures teach me that I am far from capable of having the mind of Christ, his consciousness and mindfulness and perfect union of soul and body. My prayer today is that God would give me the will to not just think, but to do. That is what I do feel called to, which is only different from the call to be a missionary in the specifics.
I hope this post has been edifying. To that end, I´ll drop a Kierkegaard quote on you from his preface to
The Sickness Unto Death that has not left my mind for the past two weeks:
¨All Christian knowledge, whatever formal rigour it betrays, should be concerned. But what edifies is just this concern. The concern is the relation to life, to what a person actually is, and thus, in a Christian sense, it is seriousness. In a Christian sense, the superior elevation of disinterested knowing, far from being greater seriousness, is frivolity and pretence. But again, what edifies is seriousness.¨
Even in our most mirthful and mindless moments, we are called to have this concern, this seriousness about the spiritual well-being of others and ourselves. How convicting is this obligation! Nevertheless, may this concern enlighten our minds with ever-increasing brightness as we live out our faith in the the One who was concerned enough for our lives that he gave us His own.
