I was supposed to be arriving home from Nepal tonight. I was supposed to be melting under my walk-in, rain-head shower for half an hour after a couple weeks in cold, concrete buildings in Pokhara. There was supposed to be a stack with two weeks’ worth of mail on the counter and a wife in lingerie writing “welcome home” in the steamed mirror with her finger. Sunday was supposed to be filled with story-telling with my friends at church.
Instead, I just finished designing the second draft of a brochure for some used construction equipment in Mississippi and then emptied the dishwasher. No GoPro footage, no full iPhone, no Asian passport stamp to make Antarctica my last continent to visit. Nothing to unpack except an Amazon box with an ergonomic mouse and matching mousepad.
Dirty little secret: I haven’t been on a mission trip since I was in the seventh grade. To tell you how long ago that was, Scott Norwood missed “wide right” in the Super Bowl while I was in Nuevo Leon, Mexico. I was so skinny and so hungry, that our translator said the locals had nicknamed me patas huecas (“hollow legs”).
That was 25 years ago.
Seven months ago, two of my friends and I were reading Bob Goff’s Love Does together. We hatched an idea to take our church parking team to Nepal. The country was reeling from the earthquakes, and we had connections with a couple who had taken in about 70 children. Nepalis needed adventurers to help rebuild the economy after the earthquakes had spooked so many international travelers.
I knew just the dudes to help.
Most of the guys on our parking team had never experienced a missions trip. Some had never even been out of the country. We started brainstorming about how this could energize our team, inspire our service, and make us more aware of the different challenges of the global church. Our church’s missions team loved the idea, guided our planning, and helped us cast vision. I designed invitational proposals that rival anything I’ve ever created professionally—and I teach proposal design (among other things) around the country.
The parking team held our first ever day of fasting. We had intimate conversations, wrestling with our priorities and budgets, our hopes and dreams. Even for the guys who couldn’t go or didn’t feel called to take the trip, the process drew us together.
I read Eugene Cho’s Overrated about moving from social media to social justice. I started reading both When Helping Hurts and Toxic Charity, key guides for alleviating the effects of poverty in a sustainable way that protected the dignity of those served. I interviewed people I knew whose lives had changed after short term missions trips. I didn’t want to be one of the reported 80% of religious tourists that come home unaffected in the long run by their international spiritual encounters.
I wanted to be like my wife, who regularly visits Nicaraguan brothels. She hugs the harlots, prays and cries with them, plays with their kids, and teaches them about identity and worth and the source of true love. Crystal and I had a lot of conversations about all that was moving in and around me.
Then, the whole thing got called off.
Due to political unrest, Hindu Nepalis and Indians have conspired together to close the borders. Very little fuel can make it into the country—so little that you don’t have to look before crossing a street that used to run seven “lanes” wide. No food imports either—into a country that grows little more than rice. No medical supplies. Practically no tourism.
Tourism is Nepal’s primary industry. Trekkers and adventurers come from around the world to play in and around the Himalayas. That’s why Nepal was going to be the perfect spiritual caper. I could spend a week altruistically investing in my teammates and getting to know Jesus people whose faith hadn’t been tainted by the American Dream. Then, after my teammates flew home, I could stay and paraglide, hydrospeed, and bungee jump. Those adventure dollars could be intentional and magnanimous. I could extricate my passion for physical adventure (and the recognition it brings) from an attempt to serve and grow and meditate. And I could do that in a way few other locations on earth, if any, offer.
The blockades started more than four months ago. The Hindu siege is still crippling an already-staggering country. There is currently no end in sight—only hope for a quick resolution. Our friends there had saved months’ worth of provisions and are sustaining life as normally as they can on their rations.
For the first time since my church started sending teams over there, we were told that our team would’ve been more of a burden than a blessing. Honoring that report meant pulling the plug.
We still pray together as a team for our friends over there and for their countrymen. I can’t speak for the other guys, but my private prayers haven’t been as frequent or as fervent as I would’ve expected after all that I invested in the idea. Candidly, I mourn the loss of the adventure more than I grieve for the hardships our friends and their neighbors face. I’m embarrassed by that.
My mind has already fast forwarded to my adventures planned for this summer and next winter—like it does every year during my business’ January doldrums. It’s not numbness. I’ve just moved on—like I do on the highway after I pray for the family involved in the wreck I just passed.
It was such work to “hold this trip loosely with open hands” that I barely felt it eventually leave my hands.
Maybe that was the process God intended for me when he put the idea in my head. Maybe the abandoned trip was the whole journey he wanted me to walk at this time. Or maybe that was a dry run for something that will require more sacrifice, more loss of control, more ego on the altar. It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the part of me that will need to be broken, should God provide this opportunity again. That’s the real estate of my soul where heaven wants more square feet.
Or maybe acreage.
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Image courtesy of Crystal George from this collection of her Nepal photography.
