Helping that didn’t help.

Ever buried a couple thousand Bibles in the ground?

We felt terrible on that day.

It was our two apprentices (serving with us for three months from the States), our Muslim-background Christian brother from Darfur, and a couple handfuls of children from the “neighborhood.”

We dug a massive pit to bury the Bibles in. My heart was heavy as a stone.

Why did we do it?

Anyone who knows the ministry of #letmeintroduceyou knows we love the Lord, generally love literature distribution–Christian literature, specifically. We delight in teaching the Word and getting the Word of God into the hands of readers.

We labor in this with partnerships from Crossway, Christian Book Distributor, Ligonier, and over ten churches who help make this joyous and laborious work possible. We support individuals, families, and churches by putting the Word of God in believers’ hands for the first time. Unbelievers who show an earnestness also receive the Scriptures.

I have watched elderly men (literate believers who had no access to the Word) weep as we handed them their copy of Scripture and spent the day teaching them how to use the resource (Reformation Study Bible, Africa Study Bible, or Global Study Bible). I have listened to hundreds of students rejoice at bringing home the first Bible ever owned by their family–including parents, cousins, and/or grandparents in many circumstances. There is no privilege like this joyous work we get to participate in.

So why the thousands of Bibles down the equivalent of an outhouse drain? Why the pit that felt like digging a mass grave? That’s what I want to share today.

We drove out to a home in the refugee settlement to help our brother. It’s about 2.5 hours from Arua town to this particular area in Rhino Camp. The floor of his one room hut was slam-full of Arabic New Testaments. This has been his situation for about 2 years.

Filled with copies of Scripture from warm-hearted believers. Filled with photo opportunities from deliveries of a great donation on a short stay mission. Filled with New Testaments that could not be read by the people around. This was because poor, incomplete research had been done. This was done by short-term missions teams who did not try to coordinate with the long term missionaries who were present in this area, did know the needs, and who would have been able to tell the well-intending short-termers that their efforts were futile.

These Bibles came to Uganda at great expense, to a region where almost no one reads Arabic. Wrong assumptions were made. Careless action was taken. Yet these Bibles have been rotting in our brother’s room waiting on those who said they would be back in 3-6 months to distribute these Bibles. They didn’t authorize our brother to give the books away. They also had no great plan for how to do so themselves after this blunder was realized. They didn’t want to pay to store the books in town. In the process this brother was left in a difficult position.

And as the boxes sat, most were eaten through by termites: cardboard boxes, covers, bindings all chewed through. Holes through the entire New Testament, some Bibles turned completely to dust and termite waste–in every shape and fashion rendering them useless.

This was easily one of the saddest things I’ve laid my eyes on. It just makes you want to weep; especially when you know that these resources in the right location are desperately needed and sorely unavailable. I want you to know that doing the right thing is hard. It takes work but it is worth that effort. Otherwise it would be better if you’d done nothing at all, as in this situation. Bad “help” causes more work and more problems. It’s a detriment, an un-help. Sadly there is a lot of short-term impact planning all the time that won’t lead to a long term benefit.

This is not my scathing rebuke of short term missions. This is my caution and rebuke against wastefulness, poor stewardship, poorly executed missions’ endeavors (whether short or long-term) and projects for the sake of pictures and saying “we got the job done” when the task was incomplete. In our own homes and lives, we desire to plan faithfully, engineer well, account rightly, run business with integrity, research with depth, preach biblically, raise up family compassionately. Why would this be any different on the mission field whatever the duration? Of course at times there are blunders, miscalculations, and so on; but this cannot be the norm. It saddens me to say there is a lot of this going on.

Those who have long-term financial investments in other fields don’t carry them out recklessly but with diligence. Those maintaining a home, fixing a pipe, mowing a lawn, balancing the books, studying for exams, or reading the Word cannot afford to do so without attentiveness. The Great Commission is no exception. We cannot afford to cut corners. These endeavors, whether at home or abroad, cannot be with an “anything goes” mindset with the hope that it’ll all work out equivalently. Good planning has a tendency to bring about good results. Poor planning hurts believers and unbelievers alike. It mars our testimony when we do something that looks good at a glance, and exceedingly unhelpful in the long run.

We must have buried 7000 chewed up New Testaments that day. Each and every one was nothing that you could place in someone’s hands. Nothing that could be read. Nothing that could be used. But by God’s grace, through some willing servants, and a lot of muscle in the heat of the African midday sun, we sorted out 2,500 that could still be used. We wiped off 2,500 New Testaments, one by one. We did our best to waste nothing that could be salvaged. And we made the decision to bury all that could not be used, so the tattered pages of God’s Word would not be used as fire starter or toilet paper.

These 2,500 New Testaments that were salvaged were trucked back to the town of Arua, cleaned, counted and boxed. Plans were made and carried out for their transport in various directions where they can be read and where believers have been eagerly awaiting them!

This was costly. Far more costly than if they had gone to the right places the first time around. Far more costly and time consuming then if we had just burned them all or buried them all. Time, energy, and a lot of emotion were expended. But it was worth it to get these 2,500 copies of Arabic New Testaments up to a city in South Sudan, to the rural areas bordering northern Sudan where the Islamic population is gladly receiving the true Scriptures, and several other locations.

My plea: do not make this same mistake. This didn’t have to be done wrongly and wastefully before being done rightly at a greater expense.

7,000 of them went in the ground. The digging was with a shovel and a pickaxe, and a rotation of five sturdy men. That was all the tools we could scrounge up.

All of the boxes were eaten through, so a bed frame was used to transport the good books to the truck from the house, and then to escort the remnants of all the destroyed Biblical materials to their burial. I could see this wearing on the apprentices. The two local brothers had seen things like this many times before. It was important for me that the young men serving as apprentices saw what poorly executed help looks like. Not everything titled “help” lives up to the name. If you question your missionaries, and beg their honesty, they will gladly and gratefully tell you their own stories.

I think this experience pierced our young men. I am grateful for the things I was able to show them: good, bad, and ugly. I saw them grow. And my wife and I have grown a lot living in a cross-cultural context. We have learned from our mistakes, and the mistakes of honest folks around us: mentors, fellow missionaries, and those who have gone before us. I am sure we have many mistakes ahead of us to learn from still. I hope this has an impact on you as well.

Whatever you do: work at it with you mind and heart and soul as unto the Lord. And don’t settle for organizing projects and initiatives that are not seen through with the attention you place on reviewing a job offer, your savings and investments, and your children’s health…because this matters just as much, if not more.

May we all labor together for the advance of the Gospel in hard places. May we pray for the lost, pray diligently for the unreached who have not heard, and labor with wisdom that comes from a wholesome and right fear of the Living God. When we half-bake a project then curate it to look nice to folks back home, never knowing the actual outcome, it could come from laziness, self-preservation, showmanship, pride, or a lack of reverence for Who it is we are serving.

I told the young men we weren’t the ones burying the Word of God that day. The folks who dumped them all in the wrong place were, and with no care for the Christian brother they dumped them on with unkept promises and no plans or follow up over two years. We were doing their clean up work, serving and helping our brother, and salvaging what we could in order to send to believers and unbelievers alike who would be excited to receive the Arabic script declaring the gospel of Christ Jesus our Lord.

We are not good in our strength. We are not better than anyone. But we are doing our best to walk in step with the Spirit and do things better on the ground than some of what we have seen in the past years. We commend those alongside us doing the same, and we praise God there are many! May the Kingdom of God advance. May the Lamb who was slain receive the reward He is due, the reward of His suffering.

We commit to doing the best we can with what we have and the people and opportunities the Lord entrusts to us. It is our prayer that we would not be lacking in anything but ever committed with spiritual discernment to the cause of discipleship among believers, the encouragement of local churches, and the evangelism of the lost. We long and strive to be diligent in all the Lord leads us. That is our promise to you all who support us by your prayers, financial gifts, and words of encouragement when you reach out.

That’s why we can call you our yokefellows and mean it.

#JESUSisLORD