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Kyle Gordon’s Barry Bergen lands in southern Africa and greets a man with the Swahili word for hello. The man answers him in Zulu. Bergen decides the word must be the man’s name and spends the rest of the song calling him Mr. Jambo.

In the second verse, he admits he couldn’t understand anything the man said, but he knew the meaning was whatever he had decided he heard.

I’ve sat through that testimony. Many times. It usually opens with a slideshow.

A youth pastor I knew came home from a week abroad with his church group. Part of their assignment was painting a building. After they settled in and started working, he noticed the paint was thick. Layers on layers. Corners rounded off. Hinges swallowed. Doorknobs painted shut and painted again.

He asked one of the men who worked there why the building looked like that.

The man told him it was an easy project for groups to complete.

The building didn’t need paint. It had a function, and the function was absorbing volunteers. Somebody on staff had been tasked with finding work for Americans and had been doing it long enough that the walls carried a sediment layer. Every summer another group landed, another few gallons went up, another photo went home.

That’s the part the support letters leave out.

The hosts were the ones working. They handled the preparation, logistics, and supervision so a group of teenagers could feel like they had built something. Then they cleaned up and ran it again in August for the next church.

The service went the other direction all week.

Because the paint was never the deliverable. I know what the deliverable is. I’ve stood at the back of a sanctuary while it was handed over.

The kid gets ninety seconds at the microphone on a Sunday in August. He talks about the poverty. He says they had nothing and were happier than anybody he knows back home. He says God broke his heart for the nations. Somebody in the third row cries. The missions committee books next year’s trip before the postlude.

That product came out of the mold on schedule because the itinerary was built to produce it.

The debrief circles were on the agenda. The journal prompts were printed and three-hole-punched. The evening reflection had a worksheet with a Scripture at the top. The transformation was on the calendar before the plane left Raleigh.

Nobody had to defraud anybody. The church paid four thousand dollars a head for a feeling, and the machinery delivered it on time.

Bergen knew the meaning was whatever he had decided he heard. So did the kid.

Both of them came home with a story about a man who was never once asked what he thought about any of it.

There’s a building somewhere with forty coats of paint on it.

It’s an easy project for groups to complete.

If this felt a little too accurate, there’s more where that came from.

The Tribulation Survival Guide

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