the correction of missions

Hello. Long time, no blog.

It is amazing to me how much of your view of the world can be based on who you choose to compare yourself to. One of the core values of Summit (recent two week urban plunge) was simplicity. The question is; simplicity in comparison to whom? It is easy to find people that I live more simply than and it is easy to ignore people who have really chosen to live a simple life. I can spend most of my year reveling in my own relative simplicity. I can scoff at others who are more wasteful and materialistic than myself.

This is of course why I need mission trips.

I need to see that others do not get to choose their level of simplicity, it is a choice that has been made for them. I need to spend some time really living by needs and become struck by how little I miss my toys. I need to what drives people to work long hours for $60 a month (and room and board). I need to see that is actually possible to live differently.

Consumerism is something that we breathe in all the time. We are advertised to constantly. The video we see, the print we read and the sounds we hear all tell us what we need and currently don't have. I am aware of the ads that I reject, but what about the other hundred ads that I barely notice until they have found a home in my desire? Is it possible to long for God and toys at the same time?

At Summit, we eat on $6 per day, per person. You can barely go to McDonald's on that. But we do it. We labor together on dinner. Eat together and clean up together. We work for our housing. We live in a space that is enough. We eat food that is enough. We cut our extraneous noise so that we can hear God. We serve others after getting enough sleep.

For four weeks this summer I was able to experience what it is like to live by enough. Now I am back in the world that tries to convince me that I need excess and that right now I do not really have enough.

Without the call of mission I am not sure that I would have the discipline to reorient. And how long can one last between reorientation? Weeks? Months? Years? What does 20 years of no reorientation look like? Where do you end up at the end of that journey? I suspect that you end up consumed by what you don't have. I suspect that you end worried about having enough all the time.

Mother Teresa said that we invented poverty because we don't share. I don't think that we fail to share because we are greedy, but because we are scared. I think that fear blinds us to what we have and what we need.

Mission creates freedom because mission creates in us the difference between God and world's definition of enough.