FMP April 20- Missionary Panel

Today we had four missionaries come in and Tatlock questioned them about their ministry and advice that they had for short term missions--it was really quite interesting. Good to hear from their perspective.
Things like travel, food, housing etc. is really harder than it looks to us. They have to worry about finding places for teams to stay anywhere from 1-8 weeks in a summer. I think many times I forget to thank them for all their hard work...I mean I thank them for what I see them do, but I never realized how much work is put into the before and after. They have to arrange all that stuff and then they have to clean up and unfortuneately fix any problems that the team may have created. Sometimes we don't realize that what we think is helping could many times really be making their job harder and even compromise their ministry. Its so important that we listen to the missionary and make sure that what we are doing isn't going to cause problems because we are not only representing americans but more importantly representing God and if the people see us messing around they sometimes get the wrong ideas about the missionaries who are living with them. The worst thing a team could do is get the full time missionary in trouble. I guess what all this is really about it being a helper and making sure that we don't take for granted all that goes on because there are people who are working much harder than you and me to allow us to be able to go to that country and hopefully be of service to them. did any of this make sense?
Hope so...