We were asked to write a blog about how we were called to this mission trip. Here is my story…
Around the middle of my sophomore year (February 2007), I became very restless in the local ministries that I felt obligated to take part in. At the time, I was attending a mission-oriented church, but the only opportunities for someone my age with little mission experience were those around town: feeding the homeless at West Orange Daily Bread, spending a day at a home for troubled children, etc. Not that those things are without value, because they are certainly necessary and mean the world to those involved, but something was tugging at my heartstrings, and it was something much bigger than the metro area of Orlando, Florida.
My youth director lent me a book to read on a family vacation entitled The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. It’s a firsthand account of a life lived among lepers in Calcutta, families in Iraq and the starving right here in America. And let me tell you, nothing has ever stirred me to such enthusiastic action quite like this book. I became almost unhealthily obsessed with finding opportunities for mission (if there is, in fact, such a thing as being unhealthily obsessed with something like that), and decided to go on a trip with my church to Waveland, Mississippi, where Hurricane Katrina first made landfall. We hung drywall on the frame of a house for a father and son that were still living in a FEMA trailer in their yard. Even two years after the storm hit, the devastation I saw broke my heart.
This is what convinced me of my call to missions.
Two years after Katrina hit, a full two years, these people on the Gulf Coast had still not been provided for. And a thought stuck in my head, that if the wealthiest government in the world can’t fully meet the needs of its own country within two years of a disaster, how many people are living in poverty and sickness throughout the world that will never see their needs met?
A few weeks after returning from Mississippi, the planning began for the summer 2008 mission trip. The problem? It was left to the youth and their parents to decide where to go. There were three options: Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Kenya. My mind, of course, got stuck in Africa. As far as I was concerned in the months leading up to the decision, I was already there. I dreamt about the kids and the culture. I got my parents’ permission. And, as the Lord’s timing would have it, it was decided that we would go to Jamaica.
In all honesty, I was angry. I had considered the opportunity itself to be a sign from God that Africa was where He wanted me. But as the months went on, I became more and more at peace with the idea of Jamaica, and this past August spent a week there ministering to a small church in a rural village outside Ocho Rios, painting a community center and corralling a group of preschool boys and girls for Vacation Bible School every morning. It was wonderful.
After I came home, I started looking for another opportunity for mission. Nothing struck me as I searched through several different organizations, but a friend of my youth director recommended Adventures to me. He had spent two years in Jeffrey’s Bay through AIM, and I decided it would be worth a try. But when I checked the site, nothing was available that struck my fancy. All the trips that would have interested me were one or two weeks long, and I wanted something more intensive; an experience rather than a trip. But in the next several weeks, something kept calling me back to the Adventures site, and when I came to the home page one afternoon, it had what I was looking for: a two-month trip to Kenya. I’m pretty sure I cried. I filled out the application that night and made sure my references were in within the next week. And now I’m here, 7 months away from Africa, poignantly reminded of God’s perfect timing.
