Reverse Mission

Tomorrow is the big day when we leave for Honduras. Nine months of preparation, recruiting, planning, budgeting, sweating, communicating, nagging, and praying are about to be fulfilled on our mission.

I am excited about returning to Shimishal, the little neighborhood on the outskirts of Santa Rosa de Copan that we helped start two years ago. I can't wait to see new homeowners Fatima, Marina, and little Jose Erais Limon the mason, the kids like Ramon and Jose Lopez, and the folks from Habitat like Gaby, Luis and JJ. And best of all we will see 18 families now living securely in the strong little houses we helped build. Their lives will have been transformed by the resources of the Greensboro and Durham Habitat affiliates and the army of volunteer laborers who have come from those two cities and from all over North Carolina to help their sisters and brothers in a little Central American town none of us had ever heard of.

And yet I know now that what they gave us is so much greater than our gift to them. My two visits to Santa Rosa have changed me forever. As Henri Nouwen put it in his book Here and Now:

I had come from the North to the South to help the poor, but the longer I was among the poor the more aware I became that there was another mission, the mission from the South to the North. When I returned North, I was deeply convinced that my main task would be to help the poor of Latin America convert their wealthy brothers and sisters in the United States and Canada.

Ever since that time, I have become aware that wherever God's Spirit is present, there is a reverse mission.

When I returned last spring, my heart was different. The change started on the first trip, but it really took hold last year. Every time I thought of the trip and the people of Santa Rosa, God told me: "Witness for them." I have taken every opportunity to do just that, to the point where my friends and family are probably sick of it. The reverse mission has converted me.

Tomorrow is the next step. Remembering what has already happened on the past two trips, what does God have in store for us this time? God alone knows. But I know it won't end when we leave Honduras.