Swaziland (part 1).

Last week, after church, one of our members took me aside and asked me, "Tell me about Swaziland.  Tell me about your experience."  I guess it's really more of a demand than a question.

So I told him some of the generic stuff.  Stuff I've told so many people about the trip (though I realize I've never written about it on here).  It was great to see believers around the world.  It was an awesome opportunity to explore possibilities of a ministry partnership across the globe.

The slightly longer version is that I'm not sure how Swaziland was.  As most of you know (maybe?), I went primarily as documentarian.  My job was to capture the story of our team's experience and to tell of God's faithfulness.  It was to capture the story of the Swazis.  What is God doing there?  Who are these people?  How do they follow him?  How can we be blessed by them as we have blessed them (We sent several thousand dollars of funds ahead of us)?

To develop a functional ministry partnership, our people needed to know their people.  I took a camera, a decent mic, and my laptop to log and edit footage in country.  The whole trip, my mind was consumed with questions: What's the story here? How can I tell that story best?  How will it cut with other footage?  What's the best framing?  How's the lighting?  Is the audio coming in clearly?  Am I holding the mic so that the cables aren't making noise?  What questions can I ask to get deeper into this story, this emotion?  What's my battery life?  How much time do I have left on my card?  How likely am I to need the battery and the card space later?

I tell people that it was pretty lonely.  Not in the "Wah, I miss home.  I wish I had a girlfriend." kind of lonely, but I constantly felt like I was holding a council of one.  Every artistic decision, every technical difficulty, every question I asked was my idea and I decided if it was good or bad.  No one to help with sound or to interview while I worry about tech.  I've told most people that I'm never doing video on a missions trip again unless I have at least one more person to help.

At no point did I feel like what I was doing was not ministry.  I was keenly aware of video's power to do ministry to peoples' hearts while shooting every day.  Video has the amazing power to stir peoples' hearts in such a way that they experience, in some small measure, what our team experienced while we were there.  With a good video, they will love the people as much as we did.

Really, my ministry was not to the Swazis.  It was to Impact, my home church.

I can't wait to share the fruits of that work, but it made for a pretty unemotional trip to Africa at times.  (There are plenty of emotional stories, too.  Maybe another time...)

But this guy at church wasn't content with that answer.  He kept pressing.  In retrospect, I'm really glad.  Very few others have.

He said, "Traveling overseas, serving others, going on missions trips... it changes you.  How did God change you?  What was not the same about you when you came back?"  I kept trying to BS some answer, but he kept rephrasing, kept asking, kept pushing.

(There's much more to tell, but I hate long blog posts.  I'll continue this next posting.)