Mission Navajo Reflections: part 1

God asked us as Mission Navajo team members to step out of our comfort zones, sow love, live with good humor, and discover new abilities, God’s power and His way of working through us. In many cases, the hard part wasn’t something we did, but situations we observed, and understood would not change in one mission trip, or with one food basket donation. Here are a few of my top moments of the trip:

1. Seeing the sick, poor and elderly in living conditions we wouldn’t want to endure. In many cases, the living condition is their choice.

2. Chopping wood for days on end. The task lasted for several long days, and it was done in the high altitude, with little sleep.

3. Chopping wood at all. Not being sexist or ageist, but skinny women and skinny children learned to do this. That rocks.

4. Accepting gifts from Navajo with clearly less financial means than team members proved emotionally difficult. In Navajo culture, more than in our Midwestern culture, a gift must be accepted or it causes hurt feelings.

5. Going-with-the flow in a culture that doesn’t see time in a linear way, which proved to be a challenge to a team full of punctual professionals and accomplishment-oriented people.

6. Changing a tire on an unfamiliar vehicle, without an owner’s manual, in a remote part of the reservation, with no cell phone service to call husbands or a dad with questions. And, FYI, there’s no level ground to be found at the top of Big Mountain, Arizona.

7. Teaching Sunday School at a moment’s notice.

8. Taking cold showers. Three bathrooms, 20 people. Mostly chicks. Um, yeah.

9. Planning financially and believing for God’s provision to pay the trip fee in the first place.

10. Talking through a sewing machine issue with a sweet little lady. A big deal for a non-mechanically minded, once-in-awhile seamstress.

Helene Bergren