SIFAT Reflection
So to begin with, I’m sorry I wasn’t able to update the blog while we were at SIFAT…it appears the entire city of Lineville has something against my phone, since it didn’t work literally the entire time I was in the city (not just at SIFAT). Aside from the obvious annoyances of my phone not working, it was kind of a relief to be disconnected from the virtual leash that we all carry around all day everyday.
On to more important things. SIFAT was an absolutely amazing experience. This year’s group was our “guinea pig” group. After having experienced SIFAT, my opinion is that all students should participate in this experience at least once, and that the church as a whole adopt more in-depth (more SIFAT-esq) training for all mission trips being sent out from the church. I call the trip an experience because that’s exactly what it is…we experienced different cultures and had a taste of what life is like for people around the world, and most importantly, we had a glimpse of what mission trips can look like from the receiving end. It really makes you think about what you do and how you do it, in terms of serving on a mission trip.
I don’t want to get too detailed for a couple of reasons: 1) if you have a student that went on the trip, you should really hear about the trip from their perspective and not from a blog post and; 2) if you are considering participating in SIFAT in a coming year, I don’t want to give too much away and ruin the experience for you. But I will share some of the more notable lessons that I learned while there.
What we consider “helping” can sometimes actually be doing more harm than good. Take, for instance, a street beggar in a 3rd world slum…an american missionary comes in, sees the beggar and has pity on them. So what do they do? They give that person the sandwich that they had brought for lunch that day. Seems like a good idea right? Well, what about the lady who makes her living by selling food just a few houses down? When the missionary “helped” the beggar by giving them some food, the lady who’s selling food loses business. It might not seem like a big deal, but for someone who’s just scraping by, the loss of just a customer or 2 can mean the difference between eating or not that night. Another way to go about this would have been for the missionary to purchase some food from the local business woman to give to the beggar. Simple things that we don’t give much thought to can make all the difference in the world. We just need to be careful when we are “bringing God” to places that we actually think through HOW we will be doing that, otherwise people might get a false sense of who this God is anyways.
In America we are so spoiled with our jobs. I know it might be a touchy subject right now considering the economy, but for a lot of Americans, we have jobs (and pretty comfortable ones at that). A lot of the time we take them for granted too. We complain about “long” hours, we complain about uncomfy chairs, and the jerk who works adjacent to us, but for many people around the world, they are so happy just to have a job for the day. We did some jobs that were physically demanding and we got paid our “daily wage” from them, which we took back to our families so we could buy food to feed them that night. When having a job that day means food on the table, and not having one means going hungry…when it’s that closely tied…not “I have some rainy day funds in the bank, so I’m good for a few weeks or months”, but when today matters for tonight, you are soooo happy just to have a job. Even when it’s physically exhausting and you come home completely wiped out.
If there was a general trend of the week, I would say that it was the entitlement breaking away. All of the “I want…”, “I need…”, “I should get…” type of statements or thoughts began to disappear. Some of the week was very difficult and they were working hard, but I heard very few, if any, complaints.
The last thing I’ll share is this. We were in RURAL Alabama. We were in relatively unspoiled creation. Our worship location, called the Quonset Hut, had bay doors that opened up behind the stage. The view was overlooking mountains. It was absolutely breathtaking. In fact one morning, Nate, the leader of the camp, had us just sit and enjoy God’s creation. There’s something about being in the woods, something about being surrounded by lots of trees, something about being rained on, something about getting your water that you use from a stream that connects you with God. You’re connecting with the creator of all of this, and I loved it!