As I mentioned in my last post, Liz and I spent the first week of August in Pippa Passes, Kentucky, on a mission trip with our youth group. Since the trip kept us from posting for a couple weeks, we thought it might be nice give you a glimpse of the trip.
I’ll be honest – I really didn’t know what to expect going into this trip. We had a young crew of teenagers, none of whom had been on a mission trip like this before. Even as we left for the trip, many of the parents and I weren’t quite sure how many of our group realized what they had signed up for. All that we could do was to pray, give all that uncertainty to God, and trust that He would do what He wanted with us on the trip.
And praise God, He did something!
It ended up being a really good week, and taking the teens out of their usual home context was a great chance to get them away from distractions where they could refocus on their lives, faith, and community. We had some good discussions around Scripture in our evening team time (good Bible discussion is RARE under normal circumstances), and the teens really dove into the work and were proud of their accomplishments. They built good relationships with some of the families whose homes we worked on (they even got the kids to help work!), and they had plenty of opportunities to build themselves as a team by recognizing each others gifts every night.
My biggest prayer now is that they’ll be taking what they learned about themselves on the trip and actually apply it to their normal lives. I’m a bit sad I won’t be around to see how that takes shape over this next year.
It’s also worth pointing out that our youth group is ridiculously musical. I’m going to miss that, too.
For anyone interested, we went with LeaderTreks, an organization based in Carol Stream, IL and leads student trips around the U.S. and abroad. This was my second trip with them, and if you’re looking for a trip to take your youth group on, I can’t recommend them enough.
There was one thing that surprised me, as well. After planning and organizing this trip for months, I went into it looking forward to seeing what God would do with the kids. It hardly crossed my mind that I would come back challenged and encouraged by it as well!
There were three things that really jumped out to me:
1. Knowing the Bible rocks. The LeaderTreks staff that led our group was throwing out Bible verses left and right – our church doesn’t emphasize this a lot, and I’ve never been great at memorizing Bible passages, so this blew some of our kids’ minds. It was awesome, and inspired me to work a bit more on knowing my Bible references.
2. Quiet times are important. I’ve always opposed people who insist that having daily “quiet time” is essential to having a growing Christian faith. It’s too easy for some churches to get all caught up in those rituals while ignoring how following God encompasses the entire day, not just a set 45 minutes or whatever. Nonetheless, doing silent devos every single morning along with our youth was still quite nice, and also something our teens don’t do very much. While there are many more ways to pray and live out our faith than than simply having a daily devotional, there is something special about having a hallowed time and space during the day where it’s all about hanging out with God and diving into His Word, without outside distractions. Maybe this is typical Bible study and prayer, maybe it’s something totally different. Either way, I was still challenged to think about how much time I’m devoting TO God, not just to the work I do FOR Him.
3. God shows up. As I said before, I really had no idea what our trip would look like… lots of fears, and a few hopes, but no real expectations. All I really knew to do was to get us there, and let God figure out the rest. And it’s always exciting and reassuring when He DOES come and figure out the rest, and actually works in our kids lives! Because Lord knows I can’t do it myself. At all. Being reminded that God shows up in the midst of uncertainty is especially helpful now, as Liz and I are leaving our jobs and Chicago in TWO WEEKS, and have no idea when we’ll have enough funding to actually leave for England. So we’re feeling a bit up in the air as well, and just praying and waiting for God to do whatever He plans on doing.
Finally, for your enjoyment (I hope), you get a video slideshow from the trip, so you can see how cool our teens are. And be sure to check out their musical number at the end.
