This Ain't No Vacation

Our son, Jason, leads an international relief and development organization, and he was talking with me recently about the massive number of people who want to go as volunteers to Poland, Romania, or Moldova to assist with projects for Ukrainian refugees. That is commendable, but Jason said that most of their relief efforts were being led by members of churches in these countries. The US volunteers do not understand why they are not being used when they are ready to travel to these countries to give a week to work, and they (or their churches) are willing to pay for their expenses.

I understand the frustration of the US volunteers who are wiling to help, but I also understand that their going would rob the joy of local Christians helping their neighbors.

As I cogitated on this, a flood of memories came to my mind. Then, last night I received a phone call from a friend from Tennessee who had been a volunteer working alongside us 40 years ago. Gerald was one of 550 volunteers from Tennessee Baptist churches who came to help us with a community development project during a five-year period back in the 80s. These volunteers were not pastors or church staff people, but they were farmers like Gerald, factory workers, funeral directors, car salesmen, nurses, welders, truck drivers—most of whom had to take time off work without pay because we required them to come for 30 days minimum. We lived in the bush of Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), and it took two full days just to get to our homestead in the middle of the Sahel—the savannah area at the edge of the Sahara Desert.

Some of the best people I have ever known were among these volunteers. I will never forget their level of commitment to the Lord, their passion for helping other people in the name of Jesus, their humility, their courage to come to that far away land, and their abilities to get work done. Most of them had significant culture shock when they witnessed firsthand the poverty and simple lifestyle of the villagers. They each handled the culture shock in their own way—some dealing with it better than others.

Picking people up from their comfortable lives in the USA and dropping them into the wastelands of West Africa brought out the best in most of the volunteers as they worked hard in their assigned tasks in 110–120-degree heat and never complained. However, even the best of them made requests for amenities that we just could not provide. For example, a bathroom with a porcelain commode (we had “nice” latrines), a place to hang their pantyhose (told them to throw them away), a bed with a mattress (they had aluminum and nylon cots), ice cream (really, we could not even provide ice!), and telephone calls back to the states (at that time, that was only possible at the post office in the capital city).

Occasionally, one of the volunteers would challenge my leadership and would say something like this to me: “You are young and inexperienced, so we should be doing (whatever) like this.” Usually, we could talk these challenges through to a compromise, but in a few cases a volunteer would square up with me to assert their proficiency. One fellow said to me, “So, what makes you so smart that you tell us what to do?” I uttered a quick prayer and asked the Lord to help me with this one, and my quick response was something like this, “You came to West Africa with a round-trip air ticket. In a few days you will return to your home in Tennessee. My family and I came out here with a one-way ticket, and we arrived in Upper Volta with no return air ticket. I was here long before you arrived, and I will be here long after you get back to your home in the USA.”

After a couple of years of working with volunteers from the states, our mission organization sent a video crew to get footage for some stories about our work in Upper Volta. They interviewed some of the volunteers and did feature video stories on several of them. One of them was a heavy equipment operator from east Tennessee. When asked to sum up his experience in Upper Volta, he responded, “This ain’t no vacation!” And it wasn’t a vacation for those volunteers who came to serve no matter what the conditions.

Thirty days working in the sweltering heat in Upper Volta changed many of the volunteers’ lives. They returned to their homes with a new passion for serving others in their own communities in the name of Jesus. Some of them returned to serve with us in Upper Volta while others chose to go to other countries to work as volunteers with some of our colleagues. And ten percent of the 550 volunteers who served with us over the five-year period returned to serve overseas as long-term missionaries.

Usually when we mention the word “generous” or “generosity,” we think of money—financial resources. I consider all those volunteers who served alongside us in West Africa, as well as those who serve today with Ukrainian refugees or Syrian refugees or any of the world’s 90 million refugees and internally displaced people, generous people. Most of these people who volunteer are not considered to be wealthy people regarding their financial status. However, they are wealthy in regard to their heavenly treasures because they have given the most precious assets—their time and their hearts.

“In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Acts 20:35