DJ from the orphanage

I know an older person (not really old) who lives on their own in Southern California. For many reasons, mainly their own decisions, they’re not as active as they once were. Their only real excursions out of their home are for church, weekly grocery shopping, and an occasional doctor appointment. They’re not a big reader, and they don’t watch the news, they just kind of exist. Their world, over time, has become small. There is one aspect of the way they live their lives that’s interesting: anything that goes on in their world is HUGE. If the mailman is 20 minutes late, it throws off their whole day. If the cat sleeps in a different spot they don’t know what to do. Their world has become so small, the weight of any detail can bring it crashing down. We need to keep our world big.

Any of us can get into a rut, doing the same thing over and over again. Work, home, church, repeat. There is nothing wrong with this, but if we never break up the normal rhythm of our lives it’s hard to grow, its hard to keep a healthy perspective, it’s hard to see the bigger world. We need to get out of our comfortable routines and stretch a little. This is even truer when it comes to our faith and our Christian walk. Routine is the death of passion; suddenly we lose the enthusiasm and wind up going through the motions. Any small test or trial at that point can bring us crashing down.

We’ve all seen the effects of people living in their own small world. How many of us have witnessed truly trivial decisions at a church become massive drama when they’re being discussed by people who don’t see the bigger picture. People with small worlds get very upset when the font is changed in the bulletin; they threaten to leave the church if the service is moved 30 minutes later, they don’t understand why the donuts table doesn’t have maple bars anymore. This sounds silly because it is. These are silly, stupid, trivial trials when you look at the bigger world of faith, our Christian walk, and the challenges of the body of Christ around the world.

I’ve gone through seasons like this in my own life. Several years ago, my world had gotten smaller. I had been helping to run an orphanage in Mexico for a very long time. In spite of the ever-changing challenges, I found myself walking in a routine. My life revolved around working with the kids, raising money, helping to facilitate short-term missions, etc. There’s nothing wrong with that but our orphanage, the kids in our care, and the people who came by had become the bulk of my world. One day a regular visitor approached me and shared how she was helping a small orphanage in Africa. She asked if I’d be interested in going with her to visit that home for ten days and help with some training. I went and it rocked my world.

Our small team spent the bulk of our time at a poor orphanage in one of the poorest countries in the world. It brought into focus what was important, what children in those types of situations need, and how much need there was in the world. We spent one day visiting another orphanage that was incredible: well run, beautiful, great education for the children in their care, etc. Visiting that home was profoundly humbling and showed us how far we still had to go to improve our own orphanage. Even the travel through several airports and countries to get to our destination worked to give me a bigger perspective on the world around us. I hope we made a difference in the orphanage we went to help, I know my life was changed through the experience.

Expanding people’s worlds is why short-term mission trips are so important. There are needs around the world, but short-term missions changes and expands the people who go on these trips. At any age, we need to be constantly looking for ways to see a bigger world, to experience life through the eyes of someone in another culture. We need to hear, smell, and experience life far from what we’re used to. Short-term missions can be kind of a selfish experience. Yes, we’re going to work hard and try to make a difference, but short-term missions change us at a fundamental level for the better. It keeps our eyes open to the bigger world around us, and it lets our own vision grow; it helps us attack life and our Christian walk from a much larger and healthier perspective.

Take a short-term mission trip. If your church doesn’t have a trip scheduled, organize one. It will help to make a difference in the world, it will help your church, and your world will expand. The problems we will encounter in life shrink in direct proportion to how big our world is. Make your world huge.

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