There are many things you can teach your children at home, but some lessons are only learned by venturing out. My new friend, Kathleen from {full of life}, is my guest blogger today. She shares lessons learned from taking her daughter on two mission trips.
Going on a mission trip can be a
mind-altering experience for a teenager, in the best possible way.
A mission trip is an opportunity to escape the conformism and competition of the teenage world and find out that life is a lot bigger and more meaningful than what happens in the gossip-filled halls of your high school.
A mission trip is an opportunity to escape the conformism and competition of the teenage world and find out that life is a lot bigger and more meaningful than what happens in the gossip-filled halls of your high school.
I have a golden memory of a child development
project outside of Arusha, Tanzania, on our first day on a Compassion
trip. Some of the church ladies invited
Marie to join them as they led worship.
She danced alongside them as the praise band played a raucous African
gospel song and a little girl with a raggedy doll wove in and out of everyone’s
legs. Marie was as far from the drama of
high school as a girl could possibly be.
Through that trip and a subsequent one to
Rwanda, Marie started
sorting out her priorities about what is
truly valuable and what she wanted from life. Encountering first hand the
desperate need for health care in the developing world, a dream was planted in
her heart to become a nurse, and she is now in her final year of nursing school.
What my teenager learned on mission trips to
Tanzania and Rwanda:
1.
It’s
not about you. Whether you
are digging wells, delivering supplies or advocating for the poor, the purpose
of a mission trip is service. You forget bout yourself and your problems when
all of your energy is focused on those in need.
2.
You
meet the nicest people. A
mission trip is a great opportunity for teens to be mentored by caring adults,
as well as make like-minded friends. Sometimes you make lifelong friends, and
sometimes they are just friends for a season, and either way is okay.
3.
There
are good people all over the world. When you get out of suburbia or ex-urbia or
wherever it is you live, you find that, in spite of different languages,
clothes, customs and foods, people everywhere have a lot in common. They love
to shake hands and exchange names, share a laugh and a cold drink and learn a
few words in the other's language.
4.
Complaining
is for wimps. Our Rwanda
trip leader told us that our motto would be "Suck it up,Buttercup."
You don’t like tilapia and cassava? Too bad, that’s what’s for dinner. If you
don’t eat it, you will offend the host and you’ll go hungry. You don’t like going to the bathroom in a
squatty potty with no door and a monkey watching you? Too bad, there’s no other bathroom for fifty
miles around. Besides, these kinds of misadventures make great stories.
An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly
considered. Gilbert K. Chesterton
5.
Things
will work out. Hotels and guest houses in Africa tend to be
kind of jerry-rigged; windows and doors might not open, or they might not
close; stairs are uneven, and everything is a little more rundown than it is in
the US. The shower in our hotel in
Tanzania tended to flood the bathroom, but water came out of it and you could
get your body clean. Everything happens
more slowly in Africa too, partly because it’s just so darn hot. You have to be patient and trust God that you
will get what you need to survive, the way the people who live there do every
day.
6.
Money
doesn’t make people happy. Everyone I’ve ever met who has been on a
mission trip to a developing nation realizes when they return home how burdened
they are by all their "stuff".
I'm not saying that it's better to be poor.
But the poor have a lot to teach us about what is truly valuable in this
world; your faith, your family, your health and your calling. Everything else
is more or less expendable.
7.
Love
for Jesus is a universal language. In
Tanzania we visited a Baptist-run school and the pastor asked if we were
Baptists. At the time we were Anglican, and when I told him that, he looked at
me as if I had said we were Zoroastrians. I smiled and said, “And we love
Jesus!” A big grin split his face as he
laughed and shook my hand. The church is one family, everywhere you go.
Let your religion be less of a theory and
more of a love affair. Gilbert K. Chesterton
Have you or your children been on a mission trip? What did you/they learn?
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