Mission Trips

Yesterday 12 youth and 2 adults from my church embarked on a week-long mission trip to NYC.  I believe this is their 2nd year in a row going to New York where they will be partnering with various organization throughout their stay.  It sounds like a pretty cool trip.

One of the first things I ever did with my youth group was take a mission trip.  I was 13, going into the 7th grade.  We headed east too, just not to a place as populated or urban as NYC.  We went to a small town in West Virginia.  There were about 10 kids and 2 adults crammed into a 15 passenger van.  If I remember correctly, we stayed in the basement of a UCC church in Chicago for the drive down.  We listened to "I Wanna Drive a Zamboni" incessantly.  On cassette.  There were not such things as CD players in rental vans back in 1991, let alone iPods which would be unleashed 10 years later.

Our mission was to clean up a rundown daycare center in the thick of the Appalachian Mountains.  We had a blast.  We shaved odd shapes into our hair, which we dyed with Kool-Aid.  We tore down old structures and burned them.  We cleaned.  We painted.  We bonded.  Some of us even picked up local accents.

But my biggest memory of the trip was discovering just how allergic I was to grass pollen.  One of the maintenance staff at the center had just mowed half of a field.  The other half was chest high on me at the time.  The local dog had gotten loose; it was big, white, fluffy... a working dog, though.  I felt it my duty to chase and corral  the beast.  S/he led me through the freshly mowed grass and into section that had yet to be cut.  The chase exhausted me, so I laid down for a nap.

When I awoke, I couldn't open my eyes, and my breathing was pretty strained.  This panicked my youth director, so we hopped in the rental van and made our way to the nearest ER.  The drive panicked me.  In my memory, the ER was over an hour away (it was probably within 30 minutes), and we had to drive through winding mountain roads to get there.  My youth director seemed to be in a hurry (understandably), and I couldn't see, so it felt like I was on a roller coaster blindfolded.

I'm here and writing this, so everything turned out fine, but I don't run through fields like that anymore.  That mission trip taught me a lot of things.  I like to think I helped out a ton of kids, but most importantly, I learned a ton about myself, and I bonded with a group of kids that would be some of my closest friends for the next 6 years or so.  I'm still friends with some of them today.

I hope our current youth have a similar experience this trip, minus any visits to the ER.