By: Collin Emde
12/16/2023
Imagine it is 6:00 a.m. on your only day off as a tired missionary. You’ve promised your
boys a trip into town to swim in the sticky Bolivian heat of the Amazon. Suddenly, a frantic
woman runs onto the orphanage grounds, shouting Spanish too fast to understand.
Leonel, one of your boys, rushes downstairs. As she speaks, his eyes fly wide open. He
turns to run.
“Chico, ¿qué pasó? (What happened?)” you ask.
He slams his hands together.
“Carro uno, carro dos… BOOM! (One car, another car… BOOM!)”
A head-on collision, just down the road from your home in the Amazon.
You wake Sean, the campus nurse, and he’s out the door with his stethoscope in seconds.
You and Leonel fill buckets of water, hop the fence and haul the buckets half a mile, still in
your pajamas. Two cars sit crushed in half waiting for you. Dozens of people stand around
watching; yet nobody helps.
In the green car, a woman is pinned beneath the dashboard, her legs torn open and both
femurs broken. Then she says, “Please, can you call my mother?” You pull out your phone,
but she can’t remember the number.
Nearby, you help Sean pin down a drunk driver with a snapped femur and multiple other
broken bones. You’re a business major, not a paramedic, but today, that doesn’t matter. Cars eventually take the victims into town to receive correct treatment.
Afterward, you grab brooms and sweep the road with Leonel and Sean. Then, you
remember you still have a day full of swimming ahead. Somehow, you wouldn’t want it any
other way.
Student Missions defines a huge part of who I am. My year in the Amazon still feels like a
dream, as if I closed my eyes, lived something intense, and opened them back home at
Cannon Coffee in Apopka, Florida.
The experiences I had while on my mission year shaped me culturally and spiritually in
ways I’ll carry for life, and research backs this up.
In a 2004 study of 3,723 students who went abroad, author Mary Dwyer found that
students who stayed a full year in their destination of choice were twice as likely to form
lifelong friendships with locals and two to three times as likely to change their career
plans. She concluded, “Clearly the greatest gains across all outcome categories are made
by full-year students.”
Put simply, “Lasting relationships take time to develop.”
Scripture tells the same story. Daniel was carried off to a foreign land and learned its
language and literature, and the king found him “ten times better” than all his advisors
(Daniel 1:17-20). God didn’t bless Daniel in spite of where he was placed. He blessed him
through it.
If you feel a tug on your heart toward something hard and far outside your comfort zone,
don’t ignore it. Go, and stay long enough for it to change you. Paul says “Stand firm in faith,
be courageous, be strong. And do everything with love” (1 Corinthians 16:13-14).
The discomfort is temporary. What God builds in you through it lasts a lifetime.
