With the trip only three days away now, I'm a little concerned about my own motives in taking a short-term mission trip. (Neurosis can look a lot like humility if you spin it correctly.) I was reading C. S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters last night and came across the following demonic advice in chapter six: "The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know."
Well now, that's a point, isn't it? Reminds me of the ladies' missionary society meeting in To Kill a Mockingbird where Mrs. Grace Merriweather rhapsodizes about her undying devotion to the "Mruna" tribesmen of Africa but can talk with cold indifference about the unjust trial of a local black man.
What I mean is this: I'm spending considerable time and money to go to Indiana to teach English as a second language and help with a sort of Vacation Bible School. Yet one of my students runs a literacy program at the First Baptist Church ten minutes from my home and I've never volunteered, and my own church has VBS every summer, a program that I consistently grace with my absence. Well and good if this trip helps me discover a talent (or, less likely still, an enjoyment) for that kind of work and motivates me to seek it out at home. Less beneficial if my one week inoculation of charity renders me immune to local carriers of the virus. Am I more willing to serve God in Fort Wayne because I know that while God is there all the time, I will only be there for five days?
I'm not trying to come up with excuses not to go. (And anyway the tickets are non-refundable.) I'm trying to discover the excuses I already have for not - in an important sense - coming back.
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