A Missionary's Mission

Having spent the Carnival weekend observing a youth retreat I find myself digesting all that we were exposed to during the last six days. (Yes, digesting is designed to carry both mental and physical connotations.)

First a word about Carnival: the Catholic church is so full of inconsistencies and ideological shortcomings that wasting the few words at the beginning of this post that I posses to keep you reading is hardly worth it. Nevertheless, the Carnival (or Mardi Gras for you North Americans) is one of the saddest weekends of the year when the deceived and ignorant (of the truth) indulge themselves in every vice conceivable with the blessing -understood or outright- of their spiritual leaders as long as they fulfill their commitment to 'make it good' during the Lent season. The preceding being a brief explanation I will continue with my main objective.

What we had somehow understood was a must do- getting out of the city because of the 'carnage' of the holiday- turned out to be much to do about nothing. We had intended to get out of town but did not connect the dots in time. We found however that the longest weekend of the year was the best time to be in our part of town. Everyone else had vacated the city in favor of the beaches. There was no roar of traffic- ever and even the city buses were few and far between- I woke up at 5:30 wondering what the silence was all about and quickly fell back asleep to enjoy it.

Because it is a national holiday we did not have our formal language classes so we spent most of our time out in a suburb participating in a limited way in a retreat hosted by one of our coworkers. It was our first prolonged "exposure" in two months of living here and provided us a chance to eat, play, talk, listen, think, and sleep (or not sleep) Brazilian. The church had unfortunately had many of their carefully laid plans for Carnival fall through and worked very hard in about two weeks to not only put together a program and speakers but turn a sitio into a mini camp. The yard was definitely large enough and with the added dimensions of a small soccer field, a swimming pool, a large trampoline and pool table was serviceable for a small crowd (small meaning 40 people served at lunch and supper). The guys got to string their hammocks up on the porch or in the makeshift tent over the clothesline. The girls spent the night on the other side of the property.

Outside of a day of 100% humidity all day long we enjoyed great weather, visiting around a table, catching up on homework, playing some soccer or sitting under the huge mango trees when the sun was the hottest. We got to teach them a few games and most importantly practice some more of our ever increasing vocabulary. All around it was very profitable time and outside of a very scrawny chicken foot in my bowl at supper time (dismembered from the rest of the chicken of course) everything went down very easy.

What got me thinking most about this time however was the spirit we observed in our coworker. There are a lot of resources avalaible about serving God on the mission field using the best tools avalaible, making sure you have a proper strategy, planning ahead, and using your gifts to best train, teach and reproduce yourself in the lives of those you are ministering to. Rightfully so! I want to be the most effective minister of the gospel that I can be while using the time and resources God has loaned to me in the best possible way. What we witnessed this weekend didn't come with all of these things on the front burner. It was however the heart and soul of what missions should be. Utterly giving yourself up to nurture relationships with the people you came to serve. Call it whatever you want, label it however you like, plan it and organize it and in the end, the most effective missionary was the one who gave himself in abandonment. Thanks for the good example!

That sounds kind of familiar.