Sit on Your Luggage Please!

Make it Your study
To acquire long perspective
On your many thoughts.

Sayings of the Elders

We have been training Short Term Missionaries (often called “volunteers” by others) for some 10 years now. We are not interested in building a mission organization nor prospering our own projects or even owning mission sites. We have found a deeper purpose – find out what people need and then provide it. We are striving to be experts at training expert Short Term Missionaries to serve people around the globe.

One of our key training points is summed up in the phrase, “Sit on your luggage.” The illustration comes from Third World Airport training sessions where chaos, smells, extreme temperatures and noise reign supreme. Newer missionaries are often frightened, experienced - impatient and there are often many leadership tasks to be done. The tendency is for everyone to try to do everything quickly and, yet, the leader often needs to handle the unexpected or the expected without losing the trust or control of his followers. We train the new and experienced followers that leaders must sometimes be able to pause them to handle situations. We teach followers and leaders to be comfortable with waiting as long as it is productive to the overall effort. We teach them to say, “Hey can you guys just sit on your luggage for a minute.” This simply phrase has now moved throughout most other areas of our training and helps followers through the waits that are necessary in leadership.

Leadership takes preparation and reflection. We need the long term perspective of benefits, costs, risks and sureties. We need to be sure. This takes time. Sometimes we need to tell even the urgent things in our lives, “Sit on the Luggage!” lest we fail to see further and faster than our followers.