Mark's Blog

Lost Luggage

Summer Mondays are the most exciting day of the week at Let’s Start Talking!  Beginning the first Monday of May and extending through the last Monday of August,  this first day of the work week is a day when we try to make sure that all LST staff members are totally accessible—and, if they are not out of the country on an LST project, they should be in the office.

We discourage taking comp days or vacation days on Summer Mondays.  This year the 4^th of July fell on Monday—but the LST office was open!

Summer Mondays require our full attention at LST because Summer Mondays are big travel days, and travel days can be very unpredictable.  Let me explain.

This year LST will organize approximately 120 different short-term mission projects to 25-30 different countries.  Between 60-70% of these projects will happen between May and August. It used to be even more.

For the first twenty-five years, LST was primarily working with university students, so summer months were the only times they were available for short-term missions.  About five years ago, however, we started focusing on recruiting from churches. Not only was the pool of potential workers much larger, but adult church members were not locked into the summer months as the students were, so many could go in the Fall and/or Spring!

In 2010, LST sent twice as many adult church members on LST projects than university students!  In 2011, LST will have recruited, trained, and sent approximately 500 workers, with about 160 of those being college students and the rest being church members.

In spite of this demographic shift, the summer months are still the heaviest travel time.  And because Monday is not only the day of departure for teams, but also the day that all of the student teams return to the U.S., it is the day when things go wrong!

Just a few weeks ago, a campus minister was traveling with his team to China. They flew from their homes to Los Angeles, where they were to catch their international flight.  When you check in for an international flight, the agents always make sure you have a valid passport and the proper visa—because if the airlines take you to a country and you are denied entry, then they have to fly you back immediately at their own expense. (That happened to me once on a flight from Rome to Tirana, Albania, shortly after that country opened up!)

The campus minister and his team made it through security and all the way to their gate, but while they were waiting to board their international flight, someone stole his passport which contained his visa to enter China!  He, of course, could not continue, so they called LST—as they should have—for help.

Well, the team went on without him, but we were able to help him replace his passport and get a replacement visa from the Chinese—and re-book his ticket, so that he was able to fly out on Wednesday—just two days late to his project.  That’s a typical Monday issue for LST.

Just a couple of weeks ago, one of our church workers in Asia  fell and hurt her back enough that the week before she and her team were to return, she could not sit or walk at all. She actually conducted her reading sessions while lying flat on the couch!  But how does she get to the airport with her luggage, sit in Economy seating for 15-20 travel hours in order to get home from Asia??  To make this particular problem even more interesting , our staff member that was coordinating with her team was in Rwanda, Africa, on her own project. Nevertheless, she did a great job staying in touch with the worker in Asia and our office, so that we were able to get this worker home with minimum discomfort.  That’s a Summer Monday’s work for you!

Flight cancellations for storms or mechanical difficulties are just pretty routine on Mondays. The LST team doesn’t even break a sweat for those blips on the screen, we have faced them so often! Lost luggage and lost tickets are a cake walk!

Right now we are dealing with a harder situation with a new LST site, hosted by American missionaries to an island in the Mediterranean.  We felt like this new work was going to be difficult from the beginning because the church was very small and the avenues for recruiting Readers very limited, so we asked two of our most seasoned workers to go first and try to work out the difficulties. They have done a fabulous job—but it has still been difficult even for them. Many Readers are refugees, others are just short-term visitors to the island, so few of the Readers have been dependable about keeping their appointments.

In addition, the host missionary’s wife has had to have surgery on the island for a pretty serious condition, so both he and she are not able to do all for the project that they certainly had intended to do. Next week a student team of five is scheduled to go to this site, so we have spent the last week trying to decide if they should still go. Today, Summer Monday is the day that we will meet and make that final decision.  Pray that we are wise! If the team does not go, much preparatory work and effort seem lost, and there will be people on the island who do not hear the Good News!

Summer Mondays are great days to watch God work!