I hardly had a chance to recover from my last trip when I was approached by the mission’s pastor of my church and offered another opportunity. An opportunity to lead a team that was being formed to do health screening at a school up on the Tibetan Plato. But do I want to fly halfway around the world, spend a day on a bus and then a day and one half riding in a SUV over roads fit only for a tank to do health screenings of 180 school children? That is a question I will try to answer later.
When taking people on a short term mission trip to a foreign country there are two things you would like to see happen. The first relates to the person going and the second relates to the work to be accomplished at the location.
First, it is desirable for the person going to experience something at the hand of God that would cause Him to be seen in a new and refreshing way so as to impact their life in some positive way; to stimulate spiritual awareness and/or growth in their walk with Him. This expanded awareness of God, I believe, is realized in those who spend time earnestly praying before and during their trips.
Second, it is desirable that spiritual work be accomplished at the target location. It is fairly easy to go and do some visible work, but to accomplish spiritual work the bridge of faith to God must be in place. The team goes to do their work and as they do they believe that God will work alongside them doing the spiritual work that only God can do. We can plant and water, but it is God who provides the increase. Again, this is where prayer comes in. When a trip is bathed with sincere prayer, you can expect that much will be accomplished (James 5:16b).
With these two points in mind, join me as I head down to DFW with two team members to catch our flight to Chicago and then on to Shanghai. The leg to Chicago was not bad, but the 12 to 14 hour leg to Shanghai is long and is a good time to watch movies, read, sleep, eat three meals, and do whatever else you can find to occupy your time. Traveling west you travel with the sun causing the day to appear unusually long. It is late in the afternoon, of that very long day, when we finally board the plane at Shanghai for our third and last leg to Chengdu. We taxied out away from the terminal, stopped and waited. Then when they got dinner out and started the movie, we knew we were going to sit there for a while. Three hours later we finally took off to cover that last leg of a now very, very long day. Arriving in Chengdu, we checked into our room to get a few hours of sleep before our day long bus ride to a somewhat remote location where we were to meet a ministry worker of ours who would take us the remaining distance to the school where we were to spend the next few days doing the health screening. That trip in her SUV will be long remembered.
One six hour section of road we traveled was so rough and she drove so fast that we arrived at our hotel for the night with the radiator exposed and the two headlights hanging by their power cables. Somewhere along the way we had lost the front grill. We wired the lights in place and in the morning we drove four more hours to our target location. Near the end of that trip the main leaf in a rear spring broke. We limped on wondering how we would get our vehicle fixed in such a remote village, but she found a welder who fixed us up.
On the way back from the target location, we got stuck in a stream we tried to cross, had a flat tire, and lost our brakes coming down from a 14,000 foot pass. We drove for about two hours through hairpin turns in first and second gear with only the emergency brake as backup. We finally arrived back at the point where we would catch the bus back to Chengdu and our flights back home. Sandwiched in the middle of this travel was a most interesting time at the school located way out in the back country.
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