The thing I've come to realize I love about the trips I do every summer is the intensity. You pack every single waking moment with purpose and passion, make deep friends in four days, and go to new mountaintop heights with God during devotions or spiritual times. You can't live your whole life this way. You'd burn up and crash. I'm crashing this week, after two intensity-filled, busy weeks of Nicaragua and the Jr. High Project Indy trips. I'm a mission trip junkie, I admit: it's a high like nothing else.
God has used these mission trip highs over and over in my life to draw me near, to teach me things, and to establish valuable relationships with brothers and sisters across the world and within my church. Nicaragua did that for me this time as in years past. I really got to know people from church, especially from the 20somethings class, in a deeper way that I am very thankful for. I got to spend some time visiting with the student I sponsor, even going to his house and meeting his family, which was a fantastic experience.
On the Project Indy experience, I heard from the Lord about restoration. We had spent a few days working hard to restore some recently purchased abandoned houses, and the work of restoration is more painstaking and seemingly less gratifying than building a new house. But on the last morning I was reading in Isaiah God's repeated promises to restore old ruins, and it struck me that in a small way we had gotten to participate in that. Perhaps awkward, energetic but unskilled junior high (and a few high school) students running rampant over an old house and slowly whipping it back into shape is an apt metaphor for what God's church is doing here on earth. It was great to see the kids use their abundant energy to serve God in a variety of ways, and fun to participate in the silliness that corresponded to the trip. I also built relationships there, and cherish them, for the intensity of the mission trip allows firm bonds to be established in a record short time.
The challenge of the next few weeks will be to seek God as purposefully while I am at leisure as I did while I was burning the candle at both ends on a mission trip. Then Honduras then school again!!
