by Samantha Hutchins
(Guest blogger and friend of Just Jump Ministries, Samantha Hutchins is from Carthage, MO. She is currently a junior at Mizzou and is majoring in Journalism. Samantha is active with Christian Campus House and beautifully shares about her recent mission trip experience. )
When you go on a mission trip, you’re often accompanied with feelings of excitement, determination, confidence, and a sense of purpose. Having been on mission trips in the past, I expected to experience the same wave of emotions along with my team as we traveled from mid-Missouri to Piedras Negras, Mexico.
The last thing I expected to feel was disappointment, but that’s exactly what settled into my heart as we arrived at our campsite in the late afternoon.
Of course, I didn’t want to feel that way. I tried with all my might to deny the sinking feeling in my stomach and cling to this romantic idea I had of God’s purpose for our trip. But I just couldn’t see how I was going to be able to serve Him in this situation.
You see, I was expecting something very different than what I was met with at our location. I had envisioned myself in the heart of Piedras Negras, surrounded by locals and sweet, brown-faced children in balmy 70-degree weather. I expected to stumble through what little Spanish I knew to share my story with others and listen to theirs in return. I expected to tell the news of my great God with people I had never met, each day of our week there – because, in my mind, that was how a mission trip worked. It was all about my abilities and what I could do to help the people around me.
However, God wanted to show me something else that week, and it threw my carefully-set plan completely out of whack.
What I wasn’t planning on was enduring frigid temperatures in the low twenties at a run-down Christian camp, miles away from the heart of the city, with slim-to-none opportunities to mingle with local Mexicans (aside from the cooks and the owners of the camp.) Our team had a list of maintenance chores to complete throughout the week, and as I listened to our ministry leader read off the different tasks, my heart sunk even lower as I realized my skill set was limited to touching up paint and maybe lifting a few not-too-heavy objects.
I felt ill-equipped, weak, and useless.
Throughout the week, though, God began to shift my vision. I started noticing little things each day. A majority of our team was made up people I already knew – or at least, people I thought I knew, but had never taken the time to really get to know – while the rest were college students outside of our ministry at Mizzou. A few were from different schools and had come alone without knowing a soul, and there were even some from different countries who came as foreign-exchange students. As I painted brown benches another shade of brown for three straight days (yes, you read that right), I was given the opportunity to get to know some girls I had never talked to before. We bonded over our less-than-adequate painting skills and our shared uncertainty over our majors and what our future will look like. The hours that seemed to drag on were now slipping by quickly, and I found myself laughing with new people at dinner over a plate of authentic Mexican food so good it didn’t seem like it could be real.
It was moments like these that I began to realize what God was trying to show me. Before the trip, I had preconceived ideas of who I thought my teammates were. I lived on the same floor as some of them, so I would often see them in our shared kitchen every day or exchange pleasantries when we passed by in the hallway. In my mind, that basically meant I had them all figured out. But I guess you don’t really know someone until you’re huddled side-by-side under fifty layers of clothing, trying to sleep in a cramped dorm room with no heating, right?
The challenges during our trip brought our team closer together than ever before. Without the freezing cold and the lack of opportunity to talk to anyone outside of the camp, who knows if I would’ve taken the time to get to know someone on our team – let alone several of them.
Going into the trip, I was focused outward; I wanted to see everything and everyone outside of our team. That mindset isn’t bad in itself – in fact, it’s great! You should absolutely want to share the gospel with the unreached and to immerse yourself in a new culture. But an element that Christians often overlook is having unity within the body of believers who bring you there. Don’t forget to focus inward, too. Don’t forget to look to your side and see who is standing beside you – and I mean really see them. Get to know them, learn their name, learn their story. Don’t just assume that you have someone figured out or that God would rather have you invest in somebody else.
By the end of our week at the homey little camp I came to love, I realized our team really had made a difference, even if it wasn’t in the way I had initially expected. God used the gifts and abilities He had given us to renovate a place where dozens of local children would get to encounter the gospel each summer. We added on an additional room to the main chapel, sawed off encroaching tree branches, cleared out pesky weeds, added concrete sidewalks around the dorm rooms – and, yes, we even gave the chapel benches a new, polished look with a fresh coat of paint. We did it all freezing underneath layers and layers of clothes, but we did it all together.
I headed home with a joyful heart. Even though I was limited in my abilities, I was able to serve a limitless God. He was glorified in each small task we accomplished that week and in each conversation we shared with one another. I left with a renewed sense of purpose and a renewed love for my God, knowing that He can use even the weak and the ill-equipped to fulfill His will.
“So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.”
Ephesians 4: 11-13
