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.

4 Things Every Team Leader Should Do After a Short-term Mission Trip

July is here and you are probably back from your annual short-term mission trip. Or maybe the youth group at your church just returned home. In any case, whether this is your first or 15th trip, you might be wondering what is next. The group got along so well, and vowed to get together, but you just don’t know how to keep everyone connected. Or maybe you have already been home for a couple of months and still haven’t seen everyone.

Here are three things to do:

1. Get them signed up for The Next Mile E-zine. This is an e-zine automatically delivered through email and is free. You only need a name and en email address to sign up. The e-zine discusses issues associated to returning home and helps the participant process their experience as well seek God’s next steps for them. This should not replace follow-through by the church or team leader, but is meant to enhance it. Click here to sign up.

2. Mission Trip Triage—You probably feel paralyzed by the fact that you are responsible for so many people. The problem is that we often try to treat everyone the same even though no one is the same. We use the idea of triage to help team leaders determine what and how much is appropriate to invest in each participant. Upon returning, help your team members figure out what level they are and then plan appropriate next steps for living a more Christ-like life. Check back next week to find out what the levels are and how to follow through with each level.

3. Encourage your team members to continue praying and reading their Bible. We often spend more time than usual praying and reading our Bibles in anticipation of our mission trip or during our mission—and most people like it! Push them not to let that practice end when they come home.

4. Plan three follow-through team meetings. I know everyone lives a busy life so don’t overdo it. The meeting could be for lunch, after church, or dessert one evening. Look for an article in two weeks with details about these three team meetings.

Following through with your team members is a big job, and an important one! It can be easy to let it go because the trip is over, but God’s work in your team members’ lives is not. For more on following through with your team members, I recommend The Next Mile curriculum.

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

4 Things Every Friend of a Short-term Missionary Needs to Know

Normally I write an article to short-term mission (STM) participants or pastors. This one is going to be different. This one should be SENT to anyone who has or had a friend or family member go on a short-term mission trip. That might mean you are going to have to forward this email—just make sure you delete the FW at the beginning of the subject! We don't want to be confused for one of those annoying forwards your coworkers always send you!

Have you thought about what coming home might be like for your friend or family member? Maybe you have been on a trip and know, but if you are reading this article, maybe you haven't. Coming home from a STM trip can be an exhilarating and scary thing. It is exciting to come home and tell stories and show pictures. Often we have a new purpose in life. But it can be a scary, depressing time as well.

I want to give you an idea of what to expect when your STM trip participant comes home. There is typically a four-stage process:

1. Excitement--coming home is exciting. The participant can't wait to share stories, show pictures, and live "a new way."
2. Hostility--the air is let out. Life is harder than imagined, change seems impossible, and no one seems to care. Sometimes we treat others with disdain, judgment, and superiority.
3. Adjustment--we gradually adjust back to life as it was. We give up trying to "change the world" and just accept life as it is and was before the trip.
4. Integration--taking lessons learned and applying them to a transformed, more Christ-like life. Most people never get to this stage--they stop at #3.

So what should you do? How can you help your friend or family member through the coming home process? Here are some suggestions:

1. Listen to their stories and look at their pictures--I mean all of them. It may take one whole evening. Put in the time. They need to express themselves.
2. Listen for heart change. Listen for how God is calling them to change. This may come across as contempt for their current life--don't take it personally. They may be processing our affluence in comparison with deep poverty. Listen for the heart change and encourage them.
3. Encourage them to stay in contact with the team. They have a shared bond and shared understanding. Their interaction and desire to be together will eventually fade, but for now they are a good support for each other.
4. Journey together. You may not have gone on the STM together, but that doesn't mean you can't journey together. Listen for the heart change and pray about what God is calling both of you to do or become. I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Sometimes the people who appear the least affected on the outside are the ones struggling the most on the inside. All STM trip participants need their friends, family, and church to love them well when they come home. I hope this article helps you know where to start.

Coming home is hard. Follow-through with a returning STM trip participant can be even harder. But as their friend, you are perfectly placed to walk the journey with them!

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

You’re Prepared To Go, But Are You Prepared To Come Home?

Many of you are getting ready to go out on your short-term mission (STM) trip in the next few weeks. I'm sure you have done a lot to prepare for your departure, but how much have you planned for your coming home? If you are like most people, the thought of preparing to come home hasn't crossed your mind. That's ok, that's why we're here! What is there to prepare for and how can we prepare? As always, I don't have all the answers, but I do have some ideas. Hopefully this will get you thinking:

1. The final impression--I always say the only thing more important than a first impression is a final impression. Saying good-bye and doing it the right way is important! Do say goodbye, but resist urges to make promises to write, return, or send help. Broken promises break relationships. Email me or leave a comment at the end of this post and I will tell you how I handle situations like this.

2. Knowing is half the battle. Or so that is what GI Joe taught me when I was growing up. Prepare your team for the challenges of going home. Make sure they know what kind of reception to expect from people. Also, make sure they know of some of the pitfalls of going home. The Next Mile goer guide is a great resource that has a section to read specifically about this topic!

3. Ask the team some questions. Before you leave, give people a chance to journal their answers to some strategic questions. Questions like, "what am I most/least looking forward to about going home? What am I most/least looking forward to leaving behind? What from this culture do I want to make a part of my life and how?" Again, The Next Mile goer guide includes these questions and more for reflection.

4. Plan 2-3 team meetings after your trip. Make sure you plan these meetings before you leave. If you wait until you get home, schedules will be too difficult. The time together will be both energizing and therapeutic for team members. I recommend planning three meetings that will focus on celebration, reflection, and next steps.

Coming home can be hard and it requires some preparation to do it right. Don’t neglect this area of your short-term mission trip as it is the key to life long change in your participants and not simply a mountain top experience that fades with time.

Questions for the author? Do you need help knowing what to expect, or how to prepare your team? You can contact Tory at 520-404-0841 or toryr@delaministries.com.

Honey, I just wish you could have been there!

One of the biggest challenges for married short-term mission participants is knowing how to share their experience with a spouse that didn’t go on the trip. Your spouse is your best friend, the one who knows you the most intimately yet he or she was left out of one of the most life-changing experiences you have ever had. I’m not a marriage counselor, but I have been on numerous short-term mission trips; some of which I handled well and some not so well. My wife just returned from a two week trip herself and luckily we learned some lessons from the past. Hopefully our experience can help you.

Here’s my advice to returning short-term missionaries:

1. First, avoid making quick, rash decisions. Remember that your spouse did not share your experience and may not have your same convictions yet. For your health, some things may have to change right away but try to spend the first week or two simply sharing your experience. For example, my wife just dropped a class in order to have more time for God and for our family. She was ready to quit school altogether to follow God, but that seemed a bit rash. So, instead, we decided to wait and see what God was doing and what next semester would bring.
2. Listen to your spouse. Your spouse’s life continued even while you were gone. This was my first time staying home, and I was amazed at how much I had to tell my wife! Be sure you show the same care and interest in his/her life as you want them to show you.
3. The first four days are critical. I know we all come home to busy lives, but if you don’t start sharing about your trip in the first four days it will likely get passed over permanently. This happened when I came home from Haiti last year. We were so busy, I never got to really share with Judy. The result was an emotional disconnect and feelings of loneliness in dealing with life.    
4. Show your spouse pictures, tell stories, and tell him/her about what God is changing in you. Just take some time telling your spouse about how God changed you or what He said to you instead of starting in on what needs to change.
5. Pay attention to your spouse’s response. Watch to see if what you are saying resonates in him/her. Look for areas to invite your spouse to join you in your life-change so you can be on mission together.  

If you are married to someone who just went on a short-term mission trip, you need to realize it is your responsibility to love and care for your spouse when he/she comes home. Here are some suggestions and questions for you to use:

1. Read points three and four above. Ask your spouse about the trip and look at his/her pictures. You might be the only one who will sit and look at pictures and listen to stories for hours. It is good for you to hear them and it is good for your spouse to share them too!
2. Realize this: living by faith and following Jesus often affects those closest to us. Your spouse will come back changed and that means you have to be open to God changing you too. You can either blindly follow your spouse or, on the other end of the spectrum, refuse to change. Instead, seek God’s will for your lives together.
3. Here are some good questions to ask your spouse:
1. What one person impacted you the most?
2. What was your favorite memory? (I explain it as a snapshot—the moment frozen in time you’ll remember)
3. What is one thing God taught you about Himself? About yourself?
4. What one thing exceeded your expectations? What one thing fell short of your expectations?
5. What did God enable you to do that you didn’t think you could do?
6. What did you admire most about the host culture? How can we be like that?
7. What do you miss most from the trip? Why?
8. What has been most difficult about coming home? Why?
9. Who has disappointed you since coming back? In what way(s)?
10. What new values or priorities are you bringing home with you?
11. What is God asking of you now that wasn’t there before the trip?
12. What are you confused about or frustrated by?
13. Share about a difficult moment from the trip which you are now thankful for.
14. What one word describes the trip for you?

I hope that some of these ideas are helpful. I certainly don’t have the corner on the market. If you have ideas about how to share your experience with your family, please post a comment! You can also see what The Next Mile says about this subject, including sharing with your children, by clicking here. If you would like to discuss any of these issues with me personally, feel free to call me at 520-404-0841 or email me at toryr@deltaministries.com.