Free Stuff Christians Like by Jonathan Acuff Page A

you like weird ethnic food too, and helping people. Can you hold on for a minute? I need to go see if there’s a phone in this village. I have to break up with someone.”
You get this weird common language with fellow mission trippers.
    “Hey, remember that time when we all hiked up that little river in the jungle and there was that crazy orange lizard? And for the rest of the trip, we called anything that was crazy an ‘orangelizard situation’? That was hilarious. And then that time Frank said, ‘Bring your Bobbles to church,’ instead of, ‘Bring your Bibles?’ That was so funny! Nobody gets those stories like you. Let’s fall in love on the last day of the trip and then break up when we get dropped off back at the church parking lot. I mission trip love you!”

You get to see the real person on a mission trip.
    Anyone can be nice and polite on a date to Chili’s. Anyone can open your car door and slide your chair out before you both eat baby back, baby back ribs. But when it’s 100 degrees in the shade, and you’re sweaty and dirty, and you have to perform one more Noah’s ark puppet show for kids in a desert, you’re going to be real. And seeing how someone really is, who they are in the tough situations and the easy situations, is a pretty intoxicating thing.
    If your girlfriend goes on a mission trip without you and immediately tells you “we need to talk” upon getting back, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
    Go on that trip. Always go on that trip.
MAKING SURE EVERYONE KNOWS YOUR FIANCÉ ISN’T LIVING WITH YOU
    Want to torture a Christian who recently got engaged? Don’t allow them any space in the conversation to tell you that they’re not living with their fiancé. That’s some good fun, my friend, because we want to tell you that. We want to be up front that we’re not living in sin, that we’re not co-habiting, and we’ll do anything to work that into the flow of the discussion. But we don’t want to say “living in sin” because it kind of makes us sound like we’re weirdo Christians, so we’ll go to great creative lengths to tell you that we have two separate residences:
    “We’re really excited to be getting married. It’ll be nice not to pay two mortgages when we tie the knot.”
    “I cooked dinner for my fiancé last night at my place, but I was out of salt, so he drove to his place, in a car, because the distance is significant.”
    “She has a cat, and I’ve never lived with a cat, so when we get married and both she and the cat move in, that will be a change.”
    “My fiancée’s apartment flooded. So she stayed at my place, while I slept on the couch, in the living room of the apartment I share with a roommate. Who was there the whole time and actually kept a sleepless vigil in the hall.”
    “I’m engaged to a girl who lives across town. Lives clear across town without any sort of tunnels or skywalks that connect our two houses. Completely separate.”
    I personally never got caught up in the fancy ways to say “we’re not living in sin.” I was living in a trailer home in a retirement community when I was engaged, and there was very little chance the community would have stood for any of that shacking up nonsense.
    Sure, while living there I mentally aged about forty years in a matter of weeks, sitting in a rocking chair with a quilt over my knees and a foot massager I requested for Christmas because they were all the rage in my new old neighborhood. I may have suddenly fallen in love with Everybody Loves Raymond and chuckled at that rascal’s antics like an old man, but other than that, everything worked out.
    My wife didn’t become old. She lived across town with the Morrisons. In their house. Which was different from a trailer park. Where I slept. Alone by myself.
GETTING CAUGHT OFF GUARD BY DIVORCE
    I’m married and if you are too, then statistically speaking, one of us is getting divorced.
    “Hold up one second!” you might say. “That can’t be