Short Term Missions

A group of Thai dancers from Payap University in Thailand came to my small college down today. Payap University was the first private university in Thailand, and even though it's called a Christian university, most of its students don't claim Christianity as their religion, and majority are Budhist. They offer at least 40 majors, 10 in English (this sounds very tempting to me). They have a group that travels through America, and I believe through other parts of the world, and here was one of their stops.

They did one performance at a local Friends church in the afternoon that included traditional dances from different regions and provinces in Thailand, then performed a half an hour skit for us. They didn't speak any English to us, and had two Americans that work at Payap translate the skit and narrarate their history as they danced. What I found most striking about these people was the lack of language barrier. I don't know if that's the term I should be using, but it's true that when you encounter someone who doesn't speak your language, you project a lot of assumptions onto them about intelligence and pesonality, or lack thereof, because in our culture language has a tendency to equal those things. So what I found most striking was the fact that their vivacious and unique personalities were so apparent without words. You could see it in their eyes and in their actions: they were alive. No language barrier was about to stop these people from introducing themselves to us.

They came to Fox in the late evening. There was a long introduction that had to do with Payap and they didn't do their traditional dancing, and I regretted the fact that the students that didn't go to their earlier performance (which was all of them) didn't get a chance to meet the dancers. They performed their skit again which was based off of a real story and about the most feared bandit in the land who forces a young christian woman to marry him and his eventual conversion. After the skit, the youngest girl who plays the main character in the skit came forward and gave her testimony.

Everything about their evening performance reminded me of when I was in high school and did short term missions; especially the ones to bush Alaska. We would line up and introduce ourselves, perform skits, and give our testimonies they same way they had in front of a group of students at their school. It reminded me of going to Guatemala as well: how we would go to a completely new country and new culture (not that bush Alaska wasn't a different culture) and always try to keep humble minds. Sometimes it was hard not to preach down to people, as though it was our manifest destiny to go forth and preach "our" words. That's why it was both humbling and refreshing to see these people from Thailand come to America and preach to us and be missionaries to us. They were doing to me what I had done to students in high schools and youth groups and it really did mean something to me: it wasn't just a bunch of facts I'd heard before, but the real truth of God being taught to me. I never thought I'd be the one sitting in the audience, and now that I have been, I've found it to be an irreplaceable experience.


4/7/11