We spent the day looking at lifestyle choices that missionaries make and followed that up by talking about stress.

Lifestyle choices: this includes everything from what you wear, to what you eat, to how much of the language you learn, what you house looks like, etc. What a sticky issue. There are few “right” answers. With the myriad complications added by crossculturation, much prayer and insight of the Holy Spirit is needed.

Then we were amazed to learn the levels of stress that most missionaries live with. We took something called the Homes Rhees scale for measuring stress. Scores above 300 on the test indicate a severe level of stress with an 87% chance of contracting a serious medical condition within the year due to the stress. We were informed that most on-field missionaries who are tested with this scale score between 800-1000. Wow.