We Christian just love mission trips.
We love to jump into vans or buses or planes, packed to the gills with stuff to give out and tools to use, and to head across the country or over oceans, to build schools and fix roofs and to run summer camps. It flat-out fires us up.
And our churches know this about us, so they nicely plan year-round excursions, whereby we can easily satisfy this wonderful God-planted craving to be useful.
As a youth pastor, I see it in amazingly powerful ways. I serve a group of students who are leading the way in our community, by their capacity for compassion and their commitment to being healers and caregivers in the world. If I said I wanted us to leave for 10 days to New York City, or India or Haiti, they would be packed and ready to go in minutes. (Heck they wouldn’t even feel the need to check with their parents).
I regularly get to see teenagers practically combustible with mercy and kindness and generosity, as they empty themselves in acts of service for strangers.
But not long ago, I had a conversation with the mother of a student, that reminded of something troubling, that not many churches are talking about.
She told me that her house had become a war zone; that the amount of daily resistance, and the level of disrespect and anger she was receiving from her 10th grade daughter, was tearing her up and making the family miserable.
I hear these stories often, and so I am usually not surprised, but this kid was different.
She was one of our superstars; you know the ones who are always at church, always volunteering, and always ready to do something beautiful for Jesus at the drop of a hat. And my eyebrows raised-up even higher, as she told me something that hit me like a Gatorade bath that Fall afternoon.
“John”, she said, “you take these kids all over the place to serve. They do these unbelievable things for God; they feed people and work with their hands and care for people they don’t even know, and they get home, and they treat their families like garbage.”
What she was saying about her daughter that day, is true about most of us: We love to show people the love of God, just not particularly the people we live with.
Most of us if we’re honest, know without digging too deeply, that this is true in our houses, either at our hands or the hands of others we share them with. We save the worst of ourselves for the people who deserve our very best.
We know that where there is real love, there is relentless forgiveness, and so rather than treasuring that gift that our families offer us, we leverage it and abuse it, and we daily spill our mess of rudeness and impatience and vulgarity upon them, in ways that those outside, would never tolerate.
In the same way we put on the “Good Christian” costume when we get off the plane in Kenya, or hit the work site in Alabama on a mission trip, we do so at work and at school and in church too. (Oh, how we can put on a show on Sunday mornings).
Out there on mission, we say the right stuff and we do the right things, and we sense that God has a mission for us, and in the moment, we even feel Him working through us and changing us and changing others…
… and then we go home.
Short-term mission trips are a beautiful thing. They are perspective-adjusting, heart-altering experiences for those who take them. They help people in need and they tell or remind them that God exists and they have not be forgotten.
But friend, don’t miss the mission field that God has provided you endless access to.
Don’t waste those sacred spaces in your midst, where He is calling you to bring light and to chase fear.
It is a place where injustice thrives and darkness abounds.
It is filled with people who are dying for the character of God to be displayed.
As a follower of Jesus, you are on mission, always.
You are being commissioned to be Christ’s ambassadors, here and now.
You are being presently sent to do His will and His work.
You are, in this moment, called to be disciple-maker and peacemaker.
So pray-up, Christian. Get yourself ready. Your mission trip starts now, and it begins at the end of your driveway.
You wanna go somewhere and serve somebody?
Go home.
