The Backyard Mission

When I was a little girl, I wanted a camping trip. My family either didn’t have time or didn’t have the right resources, so I resorted to camping at home. Many children have to do this, or choose to. They put up their tent in the back yard and use a flashlight to read books. Since we didn’t have a fenced in back yard, my camping trips happened in the vast wide-open living room. For some reason, when I was little, it looked huge to me. It also had carpet which I’d pretend was grass or sand or snow or whatever I wanted it to be. An only child, my closest friends were teddy bears (once a year it was the neighbor girl who was a little younger than I). When it was “that time of year” again to do my annual camping vacation, I’d “pack up” my gear and set off out of my comfortable little bedroom to the “wide outdoors” where I’d set up a sleeping bag and a “camp fire” (flashlights in the middle of a pile of Lincoln Logs) and have a “cookout” (plastic realistic burgers and hot dogs) and feed my teddy bears before reading a bedtime story and then retiring to my pink sleeping bag in my bottomless children’s indoor fun tent. Sometimes these camping trips were so rejuvenating and liberating (being in the imaginary wilderness and all) that they’d last for days, weeks or as long as my mother would put up with it.

Still, I longed for the “real deal”- a family-sized Coleman tent surrounded by tall pine forest, majestic snow-capped mountains, classic wilderness sounds of distant wolves and owls, a roaring fire built of branches from the woods and hiking steep trails by day. Someday, I will have it. In the mean time, since childhood, I had a few smaller local camping experiences. Both took place in local Florida state parks where I was in the great outdoors with the sounds of crickets, frogs, cichadas and a crackling fire- but also mosquitoes, humidity and flat swampy land. In a few months, I may get to have another camping experience in a Florida park. In comparison to the types of camping trips that go down in Colorado or New England or parts of California, it seems like a cheap imitation.

If there’s one thing I learned in life, it’s not always about getting what you want but about making the most of what you’ve got. This is a pretty standard thing that most people have to learn lest they fall victim to the type of “woe is me” attitude that makes them impossible to be around for more than 13 minutes. Florida wilderness is still wilderness, and if done in the fall or winter, it’s still comfortable outside. The next opportunity I get, I will treat it like it is my dream-come-true. After all, I can still have a roaring fire and the park still has a lake and pine trees. I can let myself get lost in the mesmerizing sounds of the night creatures or in the millions of stars in the velvety night sky. It can be a wonder in itself, regardless of whether it is near or far.

Back in the college years (not that long ago), I was heavily involved in a church for several semesters. This church, in about October, would start announcing to the college students that there was a trip in the works for the next July. The trip was usually a country on the other side of the world, and it was set up for the purpose of either ministering to the people over there in a desolate land or for helping build a smaller version of our big church here. One year, it was Kyrgyzstan (which I didn’t even believe was a real country until they traveled there). Another year, it was Russia and China. They told us in the fall so we could find quirky ways to raise money to go, because it was about $3000. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not a lot of money… but for a college student already paying tuition and room and board or whose parents are tied into paying for these things and remodeling their house too, it’s near impossible without fund raisers. People had to make their creative juices flow somehow. Some were lucky enough to have many rich extended family members to write to, but most had to do odd stuff such as take donations for an opportunity to throw pies at the toughest professors at school or to ride a bicycle across the state and back. People even got donations for sitting out in a gazebo in a park for 24 hours and freezing to the core while reading the bible out loud.

I’m normally a creative person, but for some reason, while I wanted to go, I could never bring myself to come up with anything really profitable to raise the money. My circumstances would always get in the way- studying, working or doing something else important would prevent me from taking part in these events or creating them. My extended family was largely victimized by hurricane Katrina since they lived in the low parts of Louisiana in 2005 so I couldn’t write for money when they were trying to patch their lives back together. The doors always seemed to close. When January or February would roll around and the church was weighing people’s progress and ordering plane fare, I was never even close. It was a desire in my heart to go and do some hands-on to better people’s lives somewhere it was most needed, but China and Russia were too far out of reach. This means I couldn’t do something I desired that I thought was necessary for me as a developing Christian, right?

It wasn’t until a few years after college that I found out I was wrong. Maybe God called a number of other people to teach bible to the poor folks scraping by in war-torn Russian towns or to minister while surfing in Sri Lanka, but when all the able bodies are thousands of miles away working on the oppressed nations, who stays behind to make sure the local community isn’t slipping into the same state of hopelessness as the many sad-eyed children of the orient?  

Recently, I found the answer: Me. It can take months to raise thousands and get the credentials to go overseas, but it only takes minutes to prep a spaghetti dinner for a bible study. While many people are spending time with their kids or working on a Saturday morning, someone has to be available to help repaint a home in the low-income district of town. Who will set up the chairs or the décor for a church event? Who will collect little toys to make boxes of gifts for the missionaries to take overseas to third world children? Of course there are others. There are dozens upon dozens of us. But I can proudly recognize myself as one of them, while humbly doing these things. I am not a slacker who fell behind, I am part of a well-oiled human machine that runs in high gear to keep a local ministry alive so it can send people overseas. I am behind the scenes making sure the one in the spotlight has what he needs and the others around me do too.

It is the same principal as the back-yard camping trip. Just as much can be accomplished within the 300 yards from your place of residence as can be done 3000 miles away.