So traveling is cool, but doing missions for eleven months away from family with no certainties and with a group of people you’ve never spent time with before, now that’s just crazy. Do you even know where you’re going to sleep? Will you be fed weird food? What if you don’t get along with everyone? What if your plane crashes? What happens if you want to come home? Will you be able to flush toilet paper down the toilet? Will you even have toilets?
These are all questions that come into peoples minds as I tell them about my desire to do missions for a year and all I can say is that these questions are exactly WHY I want to go. I don’t want to be guaranteed a bed and clean sheets for sleeping, I don’t want to go on a journey across the world and not try weird foods, I like a challenge of different personalities coming together for a common purpose, I don’t want to live in the fear of a plane crash when a car could crash more likely, I want to be challenged past my earthly comforts and desires. To me, all of this is a part of the mission field. If we don’t take everything from ourselves; the comfort, the normality, the safety, then we’re not meeting others where they’re at.
No, the organization is not going to drop us off on the corner of a different continent and have us figure everything out. There is a plan and there will be a place for us and people will know where we’re going to be and we will have leaders. But even if not, we’re all adults and the scariest thing in this world is death and I believe none of us on this trip are too afraid of death. We know and believe that the Lord has called each and every one of us onto this trip to be alongside one another and to serve everyone we will meet. That’s what makes this trip work, a team of believers all working together to achieve a common goal, just like a sports team, but with Jesus at the forefront
It wasn’t until after I traveled with my volleyball team in college to Israel and Palestine where I discovered my passion for different cultures and how different people live no matter their religious background. The ability to love on them from a different background and with a different God is surreal and life changing to say the least. For those of you that do have faith in Jesus Christ and you think about the hardships that you’ve been through with Him by your side, just imagine the hardships that people have overseas and they don’t have Jesus by their side. Remember your life before Jesus entered into it and then imagine the pain others go through in their underprivileged countries and neighborhoods WITHOUT the knowledge of Christ.
People say they fear death in traveling. Some fear death from snakes, or spiders, drowning or burning to death… but I do have to say I got to a place in my faith where I feared nothing, nothing but the Lord. My only fear is that we won’t do the job of spreading the gospel and instead we would get too focused on ourselves and our worldly possessions. I’m always checking myself back to reality. I do enjoy good outfits, healthy hair, great shoes and good food and if I’m not careful, that becomes too much of a focus in this world of ours.
If you sit there and really think about this trip and all the obstacles that may POSSIBLY come along with it, it’s a terrifying experience. However, if you have faith in the Lord that this is what is to come next in my journey, in my teammates journeys, in our leaders journey and in your journey as a supporter, then its instead a beautiful and miraculous event. It’s a mission that takes a team of hundreds and sometimes even thousands to stand behind a cause with prayer, financial support, and even words of encouragement in times of struggle. We were put on this earth not to be on our own, but to journey through it together. “For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others” (Romans 12:4-5).
