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

How To Solve Mission Trip Dilemmas

I remember my first mission trip, November 1998, like it was yesterday. We spent five days in Ensenada, Mexico working with a church in Colonia 89. It was not just my first mission trip but my first time out of the country. While I watched the news and new the world was bigger than my country, I had never come face to face with a world that was not my own.

I can remember sitting by myself on a rock on the second to last day of the trip with a slew of questions floating in my mind. One series of questions went like this: “Is this pastor sincere? Authentic? He seems full of faith but he is so poor, how can that be? Doesn’t God bless the righteous? Is he really not that righteous? Or do I have something wrong?” This began a time in my life when I, as I call it, had my personal theology turned upside down.

Somehow I don’t think I am alone in this experience. Your dilemma might not have been the exact same issue, but I bet you have struggled with difficult questions at some point. I even have friends who have walked away from God after a short-term mission trip because the questions are so difficult. Why is that? Why such deep despair?

These dilemmas creep up when our experiences don’t match our beliefs. In my case, growing up in America, I had the belief that faithfulness leads to material blessings. This, of course, is not always true but it is not hard to understand how I came up with this belief. The tricky thing, though, is that I didn’t even know I held this belief until I faced an experience that defied it! When our experiences don’t match our beliefs, we can go into a funk. A common dilemma is how can a world created and governed by a good, loving, and all-powerful God be so…for lack of a better word…wrong. What is your dilemma?

When our experiences and beliefs conflict, we often feel the need to choose one as true and the other as false. What does this look like? Choosing our experience to be ultimate truth usually results in us walking away from God. Choosing our belief to be true (especially when it is not) usually leads to us dismissing our experience and never changing for the positive. I don’t know about you, but neither of those seem like good options, but what should we do?

I tell people all the time, this is an opportunity for integration. Don’t throw out your experience for there is truth in it. Don’t throw out your core belief in God for it is true. Instead integrate your experience with the Bible and come out with a new belief that is true! Here’s a simple (but not easy) four step process:

1. Identify what is troubling you and why. That is to say, identify the specific belief that is in conflict with your experience.
2. Share your struggle with an expert. Don’t struggle alone—you need someone around you. But, you wouldn’t go to a doctor for advice on how to fix your car or to a mechanic for medical advice. Don’t talk to just anybody, talk with someone you respect. Someone with knowledge of the Bible, understands the world, and is spiritually mature.
3. Read God’s Word! Go right to the source. Learn all you can from Jesus’ life and teachings. See what God has to say about the world and His values. Ask God for answers.
4. Redefine your belief. Don’t pick the experience or belief as ultimately true. Work out a new belief that is biblical and true.

In my case, I didn’t just accept the experience or the belief. I went back to the Scriptures and considered how God views money, who was wealthy in the Bible, who wasn’t, and so on. I sought counsel from people who were wiser than me. Eventually I recognized my belief was flawed and needed to be redefined. I didn’t reject God or my experience, instead I used the situation as a catalyst to understand God better and bring me closer to Him.

So, how about it? Are you struggling with any mission trip dilemmas? Have you in the past? Did you find reconciliation? Or maybe you are ignoring your experience and pretending like it never happened. No matter what the situation, share it here. Post a comment on your dilemma and how you resolved it (if it has been resolved). Allow all of us to benefit from your journey!

   

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