At Adventures, we understand that weird feeling you sometimes have after a mission trip. It’s like our normal is no longer, well, normal. Well, that’s — for lack of a better word — normal. In other words, if your life feels a little bit wrecked after a mission trip, congratulations. That’s supposed to happen.
We have learned that a mission trip is the perfect opportunity for God to turn your world upside down. Living in true community weans us of our addiction to technology and artificial “social” networks. Spending a week eating, sleeping, and living with those serving beside us revolutionizes how we relate to others. It breaks our attachment to emails and texting and cell phones because we realize that in those exchanges we are longing for something deeper.
Fervent prayer cures us of our obsession with endless knowledge and dead orthodoxy. We don’t need to read another book about spiritual discipline or participate in another program. We get to live it. Since prayer is a means of survival on the trips, we actually experience the Father’s heart and walk away as different people.
On mission trips, the abundant joy of the people we serve helps displace our cynical worldview and general distrust of others. Laughing with them until our faces hurt restores freedom to our faith and chases away a haughty skepticism of the church.
But when we return home, we don’t always know what to do. How is such an experience sustainable, we wonder. Everything feels weird and uncomfortable; some things seemed even ridiculous (do we really need 100 different kinds of breakfast cereal to choose from? Cue the breakdown in the cereal aisle).
Friends, we need to fast from our culture. We take so many things for granted — like countless choices of places to eat out, much less the fact that we’ll actually have food in our bellies each day. While a missions project is just one means of this, the fast is nonetheless crucial to our spiritual growth.
When we stand in solidarity with others in need, we learn that real life can’t be contained, distributed, and purchased in mass quantities at your local grocery store. The real kind of life that we’re looking for is a narrow road that few find. It’s the sort of thing that you need to really search for, and when you find it, it demands everything of you. You sell all that you have for it. And as you lose everything that seems to be your life, you gain what is most important — your soul.
Make no mistake. We’re glad to be back in a place that speaks our language and has a few creature comforts. We are glad to be home. But part of us longs to stay wrecked. We don’t want everything to go back to normal. We want to stay a little strange. Because it seems that God works most powerfully when we’re out of our comfort zone, being stretched. We don’t know how to do this without going on a journey that calls us to sacrifice and surrender.
A mission trip helps us do that. It reminds us that our agenda isn’t always God’s agenda. Yes, it sort of messes us up, but we end feeling like a more complete person in the end. We need more of that in my life — more of our worlds getting turned upside down. We need to remember that Jesus’ definition of abundant life looks more like dying than it resembles a perfect resume or portfolio. And we need to remember that feeling a bit messed up after such an experience is a good thing. It means that we were not made for this world. It reminds me of a story we heard years ago in Sunday School about a mustard seed and a tree, and a kingdom that is coming.
Feeling the tug to do missions? Check out all of our available trips here.
photos via dyannarenee, Meredith Moyer, Stacy Povian and @the_venture_mag
