A few years ago, my mother went on a mission trip to Peru through her church. She came home talking about the beauty of the country, the kindness of the people, and how deeply she enjoyed the experience. Like many mission trips, each person had to pay their own way, and the stated purpose was to share the love of Jesus and hopefully bring some people into the Kingdom of God.
But what stayed with my mother most was not what she taught the people in Peru. It was what the experience taught her.
One of the lessons began before she ever shared a single word. She noticed something uncomfortable. The people they were supposedly going there to “help” often seemed more content, peaceful, relational, and emotionally grounded than many of the people arriving to convert them. Often, missionaries, and in this example, the pastor, seemed to come carrying stress, complaints, frustrations, and dissatisfaction with life back home. Meanwhile, many of the people they encountered seemed grateful, connected, and at peace in ways that quietly challenged the assumption that they were the ones who needed rescuing. That realization stayed with her.
Then there was the story she was assigned to teach. The pastor asked her to speak about Jesus and the woman caught in adultery, the famous story where Jesus writes in the sand and says, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” It is a beautiful story. Compassionate. Powerful. Human. There was just one problem.
My mother knew the story was not found in the oldest manuscripts of the New Testament and was almost certainly not part of the original Gospel of John. Most biblical scholars, including many conservative evangelical scholars, openly acknowledge this. She even discussed it with the pastor beforehand, and he admitted he knew this as well.
Yet he still wanted her to present the story to the congregation and the people in Peru as if there were no questions surrounding it. What disturbed my mother was not merely the historical issue. It was the unwillingness to be honest about it. If truth matters, then truth should matter even when it complicates our sermons.
But the moment that bothered her most came later. During the trip, one member of the group had interacted with a donkey in the street, which raised concerns about disease precautions. It was innocent enough; she just petted the cute donkey and went on her way. Before returning home, the pastor instructed everyone to tell transportation and border officials that they had not been around animals. He was concerned about a delay, and he was open about a Kentucky basketball game he wanted to attend back home.
In other words, he told this woman to lie. That deeply unsettled my mother. Here was a man who preached about morality, truth, and obedience to God, casually instructing people to bear false witness when it became inconvenient. One of the Ten Commandments suddenly became negotiable.
When she came home and shared these stories with me, I realized the most important lesson from her trip had very little to do with converting anyone. It reminded me of something Jesus himself actually taught. Before worrying about the splinter in someone else’s eye, pay attention to the log in your own.
What I admired most about my mother was the posture she and others took toward the experience. She did not approach Peru asking, “How can I change these people?” She came home asking, “What have these people taught me? What blind spots in myself and my own culture did this expose?” That is a very different spirit. And, while the pastor preached, and then left the people to an internet café to read the latest about Kentucky Basketball, she and others were with the people, laughing with them, learning, and enjoying each other’s company.
Real humility, whether cultural, personal, or spiritual, changes the way we encounter other people. The humble person walks into a room, understanding they may not be the teacher. Sometimes they are the student. Sometimes the people we think we are rescuing are the very people exposing the emptiness, contradictions, and sometimes arrogance we failed to see in ourselves.
And sometimes the mission field turns out to be much closer to home than we imagined.
Dr. Wesley