How To Deal With The Post-STM Blues

Are you feeling a bit off-center since returning from your short-term mission trip? If you are, you aren’t alone. The “post short-term mission blues” are not an uncommon feeling. Sure, the first few weeks after coming home were fun. You got to tell all your stories, share photos, and live off the spiritual adrenaline of the trip.

Now, however, life has gotten real. Bills need to be paid, work or school is still there, a strained relationship hasn’t gotten any better, and many of your friends are no closer to Jesus than when you left. What’s worse is that you are probably starting to feel like things haven’t gone the way you expected after coming home.

There are four common reasons for feeling down after a short-term mission trip. Read the list and see if any describe you:

1.    Missing the team. This includes both your team from your home country as well as the national believers with whom you ministered

2.    Longing for the same spiritual depth and meaning in life. This is often felt as a discontentment with your current life

3.    Liking the culture you visited more than your own. Or at least feeling at odds with your culture or even your own church.

4.    Returning to difficult situations at home. This could be a situation at home, at work, in school, and so on

 So what do we do with these feelings? How do we overcome them? Here are some ideas of how you can deal with the blues for each category.

Missing the team?

1.    Find a way to communicate with team member. But focus your communication on the future and not on reliving the past.  
2.    Don’t shut out your old friends. They may not understand your experience but they can still listen.
3.    Start planning for future ministry of some kind

Looking for spiritual depth and meaning?

1.    Don’t stop pursuing God with the same spiritual disciplines you did before and during the trip.
2.    Understand that you have a mission field at home too!
3.    Get involved with a ministry in your church or community

Do you like their culture better than ours?

1.    Remember you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. Be part of the solution.
2.    Find ways to integrate cultural values from the other culture into your own daily life.
3.    Find the cultural group in your city and get involved with them.

Returning to difficult situations at home?

1.    Depend on God for the solution just as you depended on Him during the trip.
2.    Look for God-honoring solutions
3.    Don’t get lost in the temporal—remember God’s eternal Kingdom.

What has caused your short-term missions blues? How did you “cure” them? Share with us so we can benefit from your story!

Questions for the author? You can contact Tory at 520-404-0841 or toryr@deltaministries.com

5 Ways To Be A Mentor

Hopefully you now have a mentor and you are ready for the journey to begin. The only problem is, you don’t know what you and your mentor are supposed to do? Or maybe you came across this article because you are a mentor and you don’t know what to do. I have good news—it isn’t that hard! Treat this as an open letter to all mentors. Feel free to pass it on to your mentor or to others who are mentors.

As mentors, you have five basic jobs:

1. Pray
2. Encourage
3. Prepare
4. Listen
5. Report

Pray with your friend. If they haven’t gone on the trip yet, make regular appointments to get together and include prayer. Continue to do this even after your trip. You should share prayer requests and pray about decisions together.

Encourage your friend. Here’s a cool way to encourage your short-term missionary. Write several letters and collect several encouraging letters from others and secretly give them to the team leader with instructions to give them to your missionary throughout the trip. Another way to encourage before the trip is to help with raising funds. Help with fundraisers or even be an advocate in asking for donations. After the trip, you can encourage your friend by listening to their stories and pointing out positive change that’s happened already.

Prepare with your friend. There are a lot of last minute errands to run when packing. Help your friend by running errands or even by helping him pack. Don’t forget about the spiritual preparations also. Do something to stimulate spiritual growth in each of you before and even after your trip. This could be studying the Bible together, serving together, or even just getting together and praying together.

Listen to all your friend’s stories. I mentioned this earlier. Your friend will come home bubbling with excitement, stories, and enthusiasm but most people won’t take the time to listen. Show your love by investing your time to attentively listen. While you are listening, look for how God might be guiding and changing your friend. Sometimes an outside perspective is what returning short-term missionaries need. Be on the lookout for the STM blues. Some people become discouraged by the “real world” when they come home. (Check back in the next couple of weeks for an article on the STM blues)

Report your findings. After you have listened and observed your friend following their short-term mission experience, evaluate what you have seen and heard. Encourage your friend by sharing the change you have seen—or confront them about the lack of follow through on change they desire. This will help you be a catalyst in their life. You can’t make decisions for them and you can’t make them change, but you can make their change more powerful!

Much of this information is taken from The Next Mile Mentor Guide. You can download the Mentor Guide as a free PDF. In it you will find helpful ideas, timelines for planning, questions to ask after the trip, an evaluation form, and much more. I know it will be a useful tool as you mentor your short-term missionary.

Questions for the author? You can contact Tory at 520-404-0841 or toryr@delaministries.com.

5 Things To Know About Sharing Your Short-term Mission Experience

This week marks the end of the “spring break season.” Many people have gone on mission trips during spring break and are returning home. Are you one of them? Or maybe you went over Christmas break or maybe even last summer? Have you been home from your mission trip for a while now, but still haven't figured out how to talk about your experience? You may not even know where to start--especially if this was your first trip. You want to explain how amazing and even miraculous your experience was but just can't do it justice. What was supposed to be you telling someone about how God is working around the world and in your life turns out to be a jumbled string of stories about seeing a lion, hoping to see a tiger, and breaking down on the side of the road that leaves your friends confused about what you did. Maybe worse yet, you are left feeling isolated and not understood.

Talking about a mission trip with someone who wasn't with you can be a very difficult thing. The experiences are literally indescribable. How do we talk about such an extraordinary experience? I certainly don't own the answers to these questions, but let me give you some advice and some ways that have worked for me:

1. You do have to talk about it--but not too much! Don't incessantly talk about your trip, but don't act like it didn't happen. Not dealing with the hard questions that the experience brought up can lead to stagnation at the least and crippling depression at worst.
2. Don't bore people with details. Instead of recounting your trip for people by giving them the hour by hour schedule, pick a few stories to tell. Choose 2-4 stories about significant events or people that explain your trip in a snapshot. These stories can and should describe living conditions, the spiritual atmosphere of the country, and anything that God revealed to you or taught you.
3. Have an impression answer. There are going to be people who ask about your trip but are doing it out of obligation more than true curiosity. Have a 15 second answer ready about something that left a big impression on you. For example, you may say something like, "I didn’t realize the unemployment rate was over 70% where we served. They already knew money wasn’t the answer to their problems so when we brought clothes for the children and shared the hope of Jesus Christ, they received it with great eagerness. Much different than what I’ve experienced here in America.” This might just be the hook that draws people into wanting to know more.
4. Choose a few people close to you to lean on. This could be a spouse, a friend, or a Bible study group but it needs to be someone with whom you can be vulnerable and transparent. Even though you can't tell all the stories and every little detail to everyone, you need to be able to tell someone. It is simply part of processing your experience.
5. Report back to your prayer and financial supporters. These people were and are heavily invested in your experience. When you report back, ask them to continue to pray for you in a few specific ways.

Telling your story can be a powerful thing for you and for others. It can be healing and liberating for you. But it can also help spread your new vision and involve others in what God is doing. For more on coming home from a trip, what to expect, and how to share your experience—especially in a church service—I recommend The Next Mile curriculum. Telling your story is not easy but it is key to continuing on the path that God has put you.

Questions for the author? Need help with debriefing and reentry? Contact Tory at toryr@deltaministries.com or 520-404-0841.