He Dwelled Among Us

“He dwelled among us”—this was the theme for Urbana 09, the nation’s largest missions conference. Urbana has been held every 3 years since 1946, and the week after Christmas the Hospitals of Hope USA staff traveled to St. Louis for the 22nd triennial conference.

Urbana always provides a lot of food for thought, as well as being a great way to connect with future volunteers. This year’s conference focused on the incarnation and what that means for the way we should conduct missions.

When Christ came to earth, the speakers pointed out, he “made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant” (Phil. 2:7). It’s far too easy for us to get caught up in preserving our own dignity when we do missions. We’re happy to perform surgery, but we’d really rather that someone else emptied the bed pans. It’s easy to think we’re being sacrificial when we get to do the glamorous work; it’s far harder to serve in the ins and outs of everyday life.

Another way we can learn from Jesus’ example is to maintain a long-term commitment to the people we serve. Too often, Western missionaries go to a developing country, make promises to help, and then go home, leaving their promises unfulfilled and people disillusioned. Jesus, on the other hand, came and lived with—and died for—the people he came to save; his was no short-term commitment.

This one is a little harder to apply for most of us. Most of us haven’t been called to spend our lives in a foreign country, among strangers. When we get involved in missions, it’s usually short-term. I still think that we can put this principle into practice, though. While we may not spend our lives on the mission field, we can maintain a long-term commitment, even from home.

Our hospital in Bolivia sees many short-term volunteers who come and go, but many continue to be involved with Hospitals of Hope, and, thereby, the community around our hospital, long after their time abroad has ended. We’re committed to making sure that we provide continuous, quality care at our hospital, and we employ a year-round Bolivian staff to do that, even after volunteers have gone home. Although most of us don’t live in Bolivia full-time, we have made a commitment to the community, and we aren’t going anywhere.

Many of the people who attended Urbana are students, and, as we talked to the ones stopping by our booth, we could tell that a lot of them were really thinking hard about how to apply the things they were learning to their lives. Should they go to medical school and become a missionary doctor? Should they avoid all the debt associated with medical school and become a nurse, so that they could go to the mission field sooner? Should they stay at home in the US and support missions financially?

We didn’t have a lot of answers for most of these students; God has a different plan for each of their lives. But there is one thing that they all have in common with all of us—we are being called to serve with humility and commitment.