Early this Sunday morning, nine youth and three adults will hit the road for Charlotte, North Carolina, for this year’s youth mission trip with our partners at CROSS Missions. Throughout the week, these young people will have the opportunity to meet people completely different from themselves, serve their neighbors, grow in their own faith, and develop community with one another.
When I think back to my own experiences of mission trips as a young person, I have very little recollection about what good I was able to do for others. I’m sure I painted something or poured some concrete – did I assemble pews at one point? More than any of that, I remember meeting new people from totally different contexts who challenged my past understandings of the world around me.
These trips helped me understand that God’s world was so much bigger than I could imagine. That God had created a world filled with diverse people, with vastly different experiences, in wildly divergent cultures – and that God loved and was in the midst of all of it. Having encountered all of this, I could then imagine something of the love God had for me.
When these youth return from Charlotte, ask them who they met, where they saw God, and what they know now about how God is operating in their own lives as a result. They’ll do good for others, sure, but more than that, they’ll encounter God at the edge of their own understanding of the world God has created. Thank you for keeping us in your prayers.
