Missionary Tourism.

I am about a quarter of the way finished with doing all of the things I need to do before I leave on Friday.  I did roughly a metric ton of laundry (it’s almost unfathomable how many white undershirts I own), started sorting the clothes I need vs. the clothes I don’t, and went to Meijer where I spent about $50 more than I had expected to on a mini-cartful of odds and ends for the upcoming trip.

As I was walking around with my cart full of plain gray and white t-shirts, shampoo, razors, a pair of shoes, notebooks, and vitamins, I realized that it doesn’t even feel like I’m leaving for any extended period of time; even the reasons behind this trip don’t quite carry with them the burden of reality just yet.  In my head, I know I’m leaving on Friday for the field for two months and some change; from where I’m standing right now, however, it feels like I’m merely prepping for a summer vacation.  I’m packing, I’m shopping, I’m making sure all my little ducks are in rows, and I’m feeling mostly like a tourist just before he leaves.

As I walked out to the van in the parking lot, however, I had a moment of reflection: a realization that I’m no tourist - I’m a missionary.  This equal and opposite revelation bothered me because with it comes an almost involuntary feeling of self-importance.  I don’t like that there’s a certain sense of novelty to all this.  I hope that it wears off – and quick.  I don’t like feeling like I have it in me to save the world  – or even a little slice of it - because, at the very end of the day, I can’t do a thing.

Yours (with fear, excitement, and an inflamed sense of ego),
Danny

Why.

Ever since I started telling people that I’m moving to St. Louis, MO for the summer, I’ve heard almost nothing but responses along the lines of “Oh, really?  That’s cool!  Why?”  I then, in my own fumbling way, explain that it’s for an internship with an organization called The Urban Mission.  This line tends to separate the believers from the non, as the non-believing folks tend to grin and ask me if I’m ”gonna go be a missionary and save everyone?” while those who readily identify themselves as Christians always, always, always ask, “So…what are you going to be doing there?” 

As if I’ve got a clue.  I’m irresponsible, lackadaisical, and I have the uncanny knack to relegate things of relative import to the backburner.  I’m leaving in ten days and I still don’t know exactly what I’m doing there; I haven’t gotten the job description yet.  If I could get away with an answer that merely skims the surface, I suppose I’m moving to St. Louis, Missouri because I was accepted as an intern, in partial completion of the internship program at Great Lakes Christian College and, while I’m there, I’ll be doing all manner of intern-like jobs, just live every other college student who’s ever done this sort of thing.  It’s a step along my journey to collegiate success.  An internship is the natural precipitate to a successful career, is it not?  This is, basically, the black-and-white, two-dimensional version of why I’m going to St. Louis.  I’m going because I have to.

There is, however, another reason why, in just ten days, I’m leaving to spend a summer in that city alongside everyone who works at The Urban Mission.  As I stated earlier, I don’t know what my job description is for this internship.  The more I think about it, the more excited I get, and the more sure I become of the fact that, when it comes to explaining job descriptions and the like, I just don’t care.  It is so much more simple than that.  What follows is the ‘what’ of my summer internship, as well as the ‘why’.  It is simple, it could even be called foolish by some, but it makes me feel a certain way when I think about it and that way is simply good.

There is, somewhere within me, a Love that I cannot claim, cannot own, cannot hold onto – though God knows I’ve tried.  For years and years – my entire Christian life, in fact – I’ve squandered this Love, I’ve wasted it.  Like any other element, one would believe that this Love within me would, like all matter, give way to the atrophy of age and disrepair.  It hasn’t.  It’s still there.  And I still try to hold it for myself, for my family, for my friends, for all other manners of selfish, would-be ‘love.’ 

But this is not the reason for which this Love was born.  In the book, No Man is an Island, Thomas Merton says that “…it is in loving others that we best love ourselves.”  He goes on: “Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved.”  And on: “Love can be kept only by being given away.”

You see, this Love inside of me, this thing that I can equate with the knowledge of and only understand through a belief in God, was born to be given away and, for twenty-two years, I’ve masqueraded Christianity and only held this God-breathed concept of Love hostage as a means to meet my own selfish ends.  I’m going to St. Louis to love people the way Jesus did.  I don’t know who they’ll be, what they’ll look like, or even what sort of background and circumstances they’ll come from.  But it is for them that I believe I’m being sent.  I’m going because I want to give this awesome, magnificent, holy, life-shaking, world-changing Love away – because it was never mine to begin with.  I’m going because I believe it’s something Jesus might do.  I’m going because it feels right.

I’m going because, with everything inside of me, I know that I have to.

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Friends and family, I hope you will read this blog while I’m gone.  I’ve never been so good at keeping in touch with those I love, but I hope this offers a two-way connection and keeps us in each other’s lives.  I don’t know what things I’ll be experiencing in the times to come, but I hope you will experience them with me through this silly blog.

Love & Faith; Grace & Peace,
Danny