I was 21 when I went on my first mission trip. It was a week-long trip with my church to Long Island, New York to help rebuild homes that were effected by Hurricane Sandy. If I’m being honest, at the time I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go on that trip. I only signed up because one of the middle school students asked me to come along as her chaperone (she tricked me- she couldn’t go unless she had a chaperone) and I just couldn’t say no to that. I came home from that trip with a full heart and a new understanding of just how big my God is. I fell in love with mission work during that week and I knew that I wanted to do more of it.
About a month after I got home from New York, I started looking for more long-term mission opportunities and I came across Adventures in Missions. I signed up to go on a three-month mission trip to Jamaica with their Passport Program. I think I was more unsure about that mission trip than I was about the first one. However, I was sure that God had something for me in Jamaica and I wanted to find out what that was. So, I quit the three jobs that I had at the time and put three months-worth of my life into a suitcase and headed to training camp. When I got to training camp it hit me: I had signed up to live in another country for three months. With strangers. I was starting to realize that being away from home, friends, and family was going to be a lot more difficult than I had originally thought. Thankfully, my teammates quickly became family and having them with me made Jamaica feel like home.
My team and I had the opportunity to serve in many different ways while in Jamaica. Our primary focus was serving as mission builders on a YWAM base. We got to come alongside full-time missionaries that lived and served at that base and help them in any way that we could. We also got to serve at a home for special needs kids, do evangelism, spend some time with children at an orphanage, lead worship and preach sermons. Some of my favorite days were the ones we got to spend at the home for special needs kids. When we made our first trip to the home, I was completely overwhelmed but it quickly became my favorite place. Many of the kids couldn’t talk and some of them also couldn’t walk. We spent our days there just being with the kids and loving them. We would also help care for them, which included things like feeding, bathing, and dressing them. Spending so much time serving children with such severe disabilities opened my eyes to God’s love for His creation. The world tells us that people with disabilities are inferior. That because they physically can’t do some things that they have a lesser value. God tells us that we are all His children and that we are precious in His sight. The time at the special needs home put it into perspective for me- it doesn’t matter what the world says about me, it matters what the Creator of the universe says about me. I was constantly challenged to step outside of my comfort zone and from that came so much growth. With every new challenge that I faced, God showed me how faithful He is. Whether it was leading worship, loving kids at the special needs home, loving my teammates when it got difficult, or simply needing the strength to make it through another day full of homesickness God constantly revealed how faithful He is to me. No matter what I faced, I knew that I could overcome it because God was not just walking ahead of me, He was walking with me. That revelation changed my world.
Each of those two trips taught me something new about myself and about who God is. I know that on an 11 month trip, God can teach me even more. I want to go on the World Race to learn more about who God is and who He’s calling me to be. I want to see just how much God can do when I completely surrender everything to Him, leaving behind my comfort, my family and friends, and most of my possessions. He has already done so much more than I could have ever imagined and I know that this trip will be no different.
