You will discover while traveling overseas that the actual experience doesn't meet your expectation. Short of being put off or inconvenienced, the missions worker learns how to adapt. This is evidence of cultural and situational flexibility. In certain parts of South America, it is nothing like home.
Why does touching the shower give me an electrical shock?
Why can't I flush my toilet paper down the toilet?
Why do I have to use a knife and fork to eat pizza?
Why are there cockroaches on the ceiling and frogs on the floor?
What are these blue booger-looking things in my bed?
There are a number of small potato issues that can potentially sink the mission worker. As a missions director whose job has been to cultivate relationships with pastors, church and community leaders in four South America countries, the challenges to adapt were as much there for me as for our workers. One example I will merely allude to and allow you to draw the conclusion.
Leading a team of Brazilians to serve in a two-week mission in Argentina, we needed to catch several buses to get to our destinations. In the main terminal in Buenos Aires, I had an urgent need to use the bathroom facilities. After the biological imperatives took their course, I reached for the toilet paper to discover that there was none to be found. What to do?
In my wallet were some Argentinian pesos.
As you can calculate by the accompanying currency exchange app, $6 in Argentine pesos are currently worth about US 40 cents. At that time, the inflation level was so high, the value of the peso was much lower.
So back to my story, which from now will require you to make a leap of inference . . . I had no toilet paper and I had three 2-peso paper bills worth around US 13 cents each.
I won't say more.
My point is that in missions you adapt. You adapt or you eventually break down. Honestly, it's not fun to have to give way to someone else's culture, customs or the manner of conducting oneself. And yet this ability to adapt and contextualize is fundamental in being able to bring the eternal, unchanging truth of God's Word to people.
In 1 Corinthians 9:19-23 Paul reminds his readers, "For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more. To the Jews I be came as a Jew, in order to win Jews; to those under the law I became as one under the law though not being myself under the law that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law not being without law toward God but under the law of Christ that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings."
My story of six pesos is very different from the powerful words of Scripture. But it illustrates in a crude way the importance of a mindset that is willing to adjust to the needs and the opportunities of the moment. May we be willing to do so in order to make Jesus known!
