So you have gone somewhere, packed the necessary equipment, and feel called to the mission field. Now what?
What exactly is the mission? What will you be doing from day to day? Who will you be ministering to?
Questions that seem like they should be easy to answer, right? Surely you will answer them before setting off on your missionary journey. A plan will be made. It will be written out, presentations made, and donors convinced that this plan is the one that will make a difference.
Then you land in that foreign airport, and your plan crumbles before your very eyes.
We had a plan, it was detailed and good. It started to fall apart at the airport, literally. We landed and went through immigration and customs and met our Kenyan friends outside the airport. By the time we were in the van and driving to Nakuru our entire plan had changed.
Go ahead and make your plans, but be prepared to change every aspect of said plan.
Give yourself time to learn the culture, language, and make trustworthy contacts. If you are in a big hurry to enact your grand scheme for your host country, you might want to take a look at your motivation. When God wanted to radically change the entire world, he started in a tiny little manager in a little town, in a nation that couldn’t even govern itself. He took more than 30 years to begin attempting to bring about change.
I can’t answer what it is you should be doing on the mission field, but I can say that it is hard to figure that out without being in the field. You need to be with the people God wants you to love in order to love them. If you want to feed the hungry, you need to be in a place to put food in their hands. If you want to care for orphans, same thing you need to be there to do it. (Or at least know someone doing those things. Perhaps you’re not supposed to be here, but it could be that you are intended to help us stay here.)
Plan, plan, and plan some more, but just like back in step one, sometimes you just got to do it.
