I resemble his remarks. Very busy, but very busy in an out-of-control way. Doing “just one more thing” on a project, being overly perfectionistic about things that do not call for it, procrastinating until last what should have been done first, then being consistently late with deadlines. Add to that a prideful over-confidence that bites off more than it can chew… yeah – you get the picture.

Before the Lord, I think the only thing in the swamp of my heart that raises an uglier head is Lack Of Love – an exceedingly ugly face and a fearful state in which to find myself.

I’m still open to doing semi-local missions to rural areas, like Immanuel Bible Church does to Albion or The Master’s College does to the inner city.

If we have teens who are genuinely thinking about long-term missions, I would do something like the TMC mission trip I led to Mexico City: take an extremely small team (2-4 teens), spend at least a month there, require a minimum of a year’s study of the destination language and work for (and alongside) long-term missionaries.

However, I believe that the single best preparation for long-term missions (and most neglected one) is learning how to be a missionary to America, which is already post-Christian and where a vibrant Christian witness has long-since vacated (or never been present in) many secular circles (meaning actual communities, usually based on a common interest). But more on that later.

Perhaps the most effective strategy would be to hold a “virtual mission trip”, much like TFC’s Night of the Persecuted Church last year, where we did a fairly enveloping reenactment of life as a Christian in muslim-controlled Ethiopia. Or perhaps something like a our church does for the forgotten country of Burkina Faso in Africa, raising money to send much-needed study Bibles and training to the pastors there.

Update: The Night of the Persecuted Church that focused on Ethiopia was actually two years ago. We will do another one this March, probably focused on what’s going on in India.

Update 2: I wrote more about the single best preparation for long-term missions, living missionally, in a follow-up post Lost the Plot.