I've put this off for long enough. For various reasons, I've failed to write an update about my mission trip to Italy on my blog about being a missionary. It's something I've been struggling with writing since the day I got back from Italy.
I've started to write a post about outreach numerous times. I started an update hours after landing back in the U.S. as I was doing my laundry, but that draft got deleted pretty quickly. I went through many ideas and drafts before just quitting in frustration a few weeks ago. I haven't touched my blog since then, but after doing a lot of processing the past few days, I feel this has to be said. So, without further ado...
Why I'm Not Writing An Update About My Trip To Italy
(Sorry)
This trip, and my DTS as a whole, was such an absolutely massive part of my life so far, that there is no way to do the whole experience justice in a single blog post. Quite frankly, I feel that it is not within my writing abilities to do justice to just how impactful this trip was to me on an emotional and spiritual level.
Yes, Italy is amazing. I could go on and on about the beauty of the land and it's culture. I could talk about all the awesome things we saw God do (and we did see Him do amazing things). Most of my fellow missionaries would say I should focus on those things here, because that's what people want to hear about. But that would be disastrously one sided. Let me see if I can explain to you why I can't write a glowing piece all about how awesome my time was.
I made some amazing friends, yes, but I also had to say goodbye to amazing friends. To family, really. One of the main things that is hard for me to encapsulate here is the loss I endured, and still am enduring, since the end of my DTS. Not just my Italian friends, which was hard enough, but my YWAM family endured loss during outreach and, of course, when our school ended. The hardest day of my life so far has been my DTS graduation, because of having to say goodbye to so many of my closest friends.
Not only that, but the pain I saw on that trip - in the eyes of refugees and native Italians alike - it's something I'll take with me forever. I saw first hand some of the horrors of in the Middle East by spending a substantial amount of time with refugees (Italy is the only European country that openly accepts refugees from the Middle East and North Africa). Some of these men opened up to me about the atrocities they endured not only at the hands of the Taliban or similar groups, but at the hands of Europeans who didn't want them in their countries.
I met a man from Afghanistan who's family had been hunted by the Taliban, so they fled to Iran. In Iran they were safe from violence, but looked down on for being ethnic and religious minorities. So he fled to Europe with the hope of finding equality, the hope of a better life. When he arrived in Italy 3 years ago, there were no jobs, so he moved on to Germany, where he was thrown in jail for two years just for trying to come into the country. When he was released from prison, he tried his luck in Greece, where he lived for a few months before being brutally beaten by the police for being an illegal immigrant.
When I met him in a refugee center in Rome, he'd only been back in Italy for 3 weeks. He still had the scars on his face from where the Greek police had beaten him. His name is Akbar, and he had the saddest eyes of anyone I've ever met. I often wonder where he is now.
I also had many personal expectations that were not met. I tried to go with an open mind, but I think everyone has this idea of a missions trip in their heads. I think subconsciously I was hoping for someone to have a conversion experience every other day, with a little miraculous healing here and there. Thing is, I didn't see anyone go from "not a Christian" to "Christian" while in Italy. I saw people open up to us, and we helped new Christians grow deeper in their faith, both of which are very important, but as I said, it was not at all what I thought it would be. That may have been for the better, but it was still jarring, to say the least.
Now I don't want to freak out people considering doing a DTS. My intention here is to not make this trip sound like a bad thing. Doing a DTS is this best thing I've done with my life, and going to Italy was overall a beneficial experience for me as a human being and as a follower of Christ. I just want to give people a clearer picture of why it's been hard for me, and others, coming home.
Quite simply, this trip was immensely personal for me. It's taken me this long to post about it on my blog, and it's going to be probably quite a bit longer before I'm totally comfortable sharing with a large audience about the trip as a whole without feeling like I'm devaluing it somehow.
That being said, I love to share my heart with people. It's something I think I'm very good at. So if you really want to hear more, I encourage you to approach me. Ask me about my experiences. Pursue a conversation. But if you just ask, "So, how was your trip?" I'm simply going to say, "It was great." Remember that you're asking about a massive chunk of my life, about hundreds of different positive and negative experiences that, added up, equal the experience known as "Chris's trip to Italy".
In the end, though, it was so much more than just a trip. So much more.
So much more.
Maybe I'm being super dramatic about it, but at least now you all know why I have failed to produce that update. And why I probably never will.
***
Now that that's out of the way, I do want to apologize to all of my supporters who were expecting a tell all update. Unless this counts as one. Then you're welcome, I guess. I have written a letter that very briefly summarizes what we did in Rome and Milan, and thanks you for your monetary support, and I will be going downstairs to start addressing them as soon as I post this. If you did support me and you don't get the letter sometime in the next few weeks, I apologize profusely ahead of time.
However, if you do want to hear a bunch of stories from my DTS, fret not! For this blog is where you can read them. The whole point of this post is that my outreach was really a bunch of separate good and bad experiences that made up an entire season of my life that cannot be done justice in a single blog post. However, I have found in the past that a good way to process my experiences is to write about them.
In fact, I intend to directly follow up this blog post with a short story of a really cool experience we had on our last night of ministry in Rome. Like I said in the post above, I love opening up my heart and sharing, but a "Chris's trip to Italy" update is not the way to do it. So on this blog, until I have further ministry updates, I will post stories and lessons I learned on my DTS. I feel this will ultimately be far more meaningful for everyone involved.
God's Blessings,
Chris
No comments:
Post a Comment