Featured Follower Fridays - 4/15/11 edition

 Every Friday I'm doing "Featured Follower Friday". Now, if you aren't technically a follower ...  no problem! Anyone is welcome. Share a part of your story, write about yourself, be creative, crazy, silly, poetic, whatever - and if you have a blog, be sure to link it too! Then other people can "meet" you, connect to your blog, or just find out something interesting! Wanna participate? I'd LOVE to feature you!

Today's featured follower is Brendan Blowers, former missionary kid to Haiti amongst other things. We were both Naz MKs, graduated from the same class, and helped each other through a tough year and a half. I'm so glad to be featuring a like-minded-with-history friend! 

Brendan and I on one of the infamous hikes in Haiti. (2002)

Like most any aspect of life these days, I have been realizing how missionary life follows the pattern of becoming quickly reduced into a few oversimplifed concepts and easy phrases that we repeat to ourselves and others to ease the discomfort of actually having to keep our understanding of “missions” in a process that has to be constantly redefined and thought through. In a sense, our concept of missions itself is part of what God wants to redeem. It must go through a transformative process just like all other aspects of our life, so it doesn’t remain stagnant and rooted in our previous ways of thinking, before God showed us the light. Think, for example, of the initial impact a short-term missions trip has on people. That concentrated period of a few weeks introduces us to ideas, feelings, and realizations about what it means to share Jesus’ love in places and cultures we are unfamiliar with. Yet, that initial experience has to move beyond our initial intrigue and into something deeper that God wants for his worldwide church. It has to move back with us and become applicable where we live and work. Or, it has to continue to flame inside of us and push us into future cross-cultural service. There are no shortcuts in this process of redeeming our ideas of what missionary service entails, and our experiences with missions will have a direct impact on how our understanding is formed.

My idea of missions has been formed by my experiences as well. My Grampa lived and worked as a Bible translator in Papua New Guinea for 38 years, a history I know of mainly only through stories and an amazing visit to the places where he worked after I graduated college. (If you attend a Nazarene church there should be a missions book coming out about now that I wrote along with my grampa and dad about the trip back). I know about missions as a kid growing up in Haiti where our family moved as missionaries when I was eight. And now I’ve got my own taste of missionary experience in Costa Rica for the past couple years, where I presently serve with Mission Aviation Fellowship as a specialist in Learning Technologies.

One of the highlights of my mission experience here has been weekly involvement in a computer class in an immigrant shantytown on the outskirts of the capital city where I live. Over the past two years I’ve worked slowly and regularly with a few young guys from the slum to maintain the computers at two different learning labs located there, and their aptitude for learning and serving has been exciting to watch. People in their own community are now paying them to help fix their computers and load programs for them, and we’ve had a lot of fun experiences at summer camps. My training in computers, web design, and multimedia has helped give me an “excuse” to get into people’s homes to fix their computers while at the same time supporting seminaries and other Latin American training facilities on a professional level with the Christian training they provide. I’ve also been privy to participate in a couple of mission trips led by Costa Ricans to remote parts of their own country and other parts of the world (including back to Haiti!). That has been a great experience as well, and helped in the process I described above of shaping and redeeming my understanding of missions. For example, I am still humbled by the sacrifices I’ve seen people make to be a part of missions trips. I also am inspired by the dedication and urgency in their service. I see that I still have a lot to learn.

If you want to find out more about Mission Aviation Fellowship, they're a great missions organization that does relief flights in some of the most isolated parts of the world, set up communications links, and use recent technologies to help deliver biblical training (the distance training is the part I serve in). There are more adventures and stories on my blog, along with photo albums, videos, and  an interactive map if you want to check them out.