Since March 2003, Lipscomb students and friends have been boarding a plane with their destination being Saba. It's hard to believe that we just concluded the sixteenth Spring Break trip to the little five square mile haven. A few days back home, my heart is still full of thanksgiving.
My first experience with short term missions was in college. I was a freshman. I loaded a caravan of buses with approximately 100 of my closest friends and we headed to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. We worked hard and sweated profusely as we dug a septic tank hole and helped build houses and church buildings. Our clothes were stinky and dust covered by the end of each day.
It was messy.
The next year I became an intern with a church youth group. Just after school ended for the year, I traveled to The City of Children for the very first time. As a team, we not only worked at teaching the children who called this beautiful place home, we also mixed concrete and made cinder blocks. In the mornings we worked tirelessly and by noon our muscles ached and some of us wore more cement than filled the molds.
It was messy.
The Spring of my Junior year a small group of us University Christian Student Center students headed to Chicago to carry out church building renovations and be a part of a week of bible study. We did everything from clear out storage rooms, scrub the mildewed baptistery, and paint the walls. Paint fumes gave us headaches and made us dizzy. When I returned home the scrub pants I had packed to work in were splattered with paint.
It was messy.
When the work on Saba began, no one really knew what to expect. The first teams did about anything and everything that was asked of them. Trails were walked in order to be cleared and cleaned. Bays were visited and unbelievable amounts of trash were collected and disposed of properly. School buildings and houses were also cleaned and painted.
It was messy.
Somewhere along the way the Father molded the Saba trips into something different. The surface level "Okays" and Alrights" on the road began to go a bit deeper. The brief greetings in Big Rock Market turned into conversations. Those conversations turned into visits in people's cottages.
In the years to follow, Lipscomb team members were inspired to not only just know the youth on the island but to connect to them. They began to tell their stories. Walls began to come down. Differences began to diminish and similarities began to be too numerous to count.
Laughter began to be heard on the road with a mixture of Southern drawl and Saban dialect harmonizing into one beautiful melody. Conversations began to be had way into the night. A playground and a courtyard began to be safe place not only where to play and relax between classes, but also to allow emotions to be felt and fears to be heard. Life was lived alongside each other...even across the miles that separate. The short term became the long term.
These trips, this mission, this work became what I would term "relationship mission". And guess what...
It's the messiest.
And it's beautiful.
Because when God calls for true spiritual relationship, connection becomes a two way street filled with vulnerability, real transparency, compassion, and empathy. And friends, those things...they are messier than any mud, cement, or paint. When we put ourselves out there, there is a risk that can create fear and there is a responsibility to carry someone else's junk in our pockets. It gets chaotic and crowded. Things are heavy and hard. Sometimes there is light but lots of time we sit in the dark places, holding a hand or sharing a tear.
This human connection and need for deep relationship, yeah, us humans have tried to stifle it because it's scary. It isn't comfortable or cozy. Remember, it's messy. We think we like the safety of our secrets and boundaries of our comfort zones.
Satan has created the sin of people pleasing. He has taken guilt and made it unhealthy shame. He has filled us so full of lies in order to keep us from a beautiful and precious gift the Father always intended us to have. God wanted us to have it so badly that He took on flesh in order to live it out in human form right alongside us.
Because in our messes, in our weaknesses, His strength is seen and He is made stronger. Our struggles and sin exist in order for love to be present, faith to be increased, and grace to be extended. And when we share this life with others the loads become lighter and we can breathe a little easier, knowing we are so very much different, but we also are very much the same.
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