Two weeks ago my squad had its Parent Vision Trip, a five day trip for parents to join their racer/child in ministry (plus have a little fun, I won’t lie). I can say without a doubt it was one of the most influential times of my race.
My parents and I are very close, but that’s not to say our relationship has always been perfect and cutesy. There was a time as a teenager that I was overwhelmed with resentment and bitterness for my parents and their decisions. The pinnacle of my testimony involves a horrific argument with my father about my relationship the Lord and where I would attend church. I strongly stand by the fact that the Lord was speaking to my parents during that conversation and I was completely a vessel for the hard things He wanted to say. I think the first time prayer ever brought tears to my eyes was when I begged God to show my father how much He loved him and wanted to be closer to him. I will spare the details, and jump to the ending where both of my parents and younger brother have come to know Christ on a completely different level, and my parents have an incredibly stronger marriage.
That was 5 years ago. Fast forward some and I have been in the field for 9 months. I have been face to face with things like extreme poverty, AIDs, starvation, and prostitution. I have had 60 hour travel day(s), poisonous beetle bites, and three anaphylactic allergic reactions. I have dipped my toes in a couple oceans, photographed beautiful people and seen wonders of the world. My parents have not – they’ve never been on a mission trip at all.
My hands have become callused. I can see inhumane living conditions in a jail, children’s knees that are a too knobby to be near healthy and work all day in extreme heat, and later sleep like a baby. But my parents’ hands are not callused. The forced, horrific living conditions for fellow fathers behind bars, the joy of a little girl when you paint her nails and tell her she’s beautiful, and the economic opportunity created by a bunch of lime trees cut my parents. It caused blisters they couldn’t ignore. As I watched my parents process these things my heart was jump started. I thought I was the hardened ER nurse ready to show my little intern parents a thing or two, but really I was a patient laying on a gurney in a busy hallway waiting for someone to restart my heart.
On our first day of ministry together, less than 24 hours since I had seen my parents for the first time since New Year’s Eve, the dads and some daughters were piled into two truck beds on our way to the Granada jail. Throughout the month we had visited the prison 4 other times, each time becoming closer and closer friends with men who initially scared most of us. What do you think of people in jail? Probably not the kindest, most sincere people there are, right? Well what we had discovered were men with great biblical knowledge, longing for worth, praying freely, and offering any gifts they could to people who visited them. Not once did I feel unsafe there. That day with our dads I was supposed to take pictures of the free hair cuts for my host who leads the jail ministry, and maybe some video clips of the indoor worship. My photographer Achilles heal caught up with me and my camera battery was promising an early death. I got some clips, but my battery died at the exact moment God intended me to see something with my naked eye and not behind the safety of my lens: my dad and one other man, a local ex-pat named Jerry who has done jail ministry each week with us, entered “the cage” to serve and talk with prisoners – just the two of them. The cage is the outdoor cell, roughly 20x 50ft, for 40 grown men. It’s totally open air with cement pavers for the floor and wood benches for beds. The plan was for all of us to enter and do our normal bible studies, however things didn’t go as planned, but that didn’t deter Jerry from jumping in when he could and my dad fearlessly entering behind him. From the outside of the cage I saw my dad sit and listen to an innocent man tell his story of how he had come to be in the jail due to an extremely corrupt judicial system. I watched my dad take it all in and occasionally look around the room at the men he was now in close quarters with; like waves from the ocean, I watched the realizations of the inhumaneness and pain of their lives wash over my dad. During those few minutes the Lord spoke to me and asked me to see with fresh eyes the stories, joys and struggles of the people around me like my dad was at that very moment. Later, retelling this moment of realization to the whole groups of racers and parents I was moved to tears.
(There were a few other moments just like this one in which I saw my parents experience what has come to be “my world’ – the strongest stories being near literal “Good Samaritans” as I and others helped people who were lost in our city alone or extremely injured on the side of the road. — I would love to talk about these things someday, face to face.)
Those five days didn’t make my parents think I’m a superhero, because dear Lord, I am NOT. It opened their eyes to the reality of what “missions” means: bringing the Kingdom of the Lord to earth by loving the least, the last and the lost every day. And it restarted my heart towards the gravity of the amazing gift that is serving my God for 11 months in 11 countries.
