It’s amazing how broad and just how limited our lives all are. When taking into account the reality of how many people exist on this earth, and the true likelihood of a singular person ending up in a singular place with a singular group of people… it’s really unlikely. It’s this logic that meets me when I wonder if God is really there, and I realize that He most certainly is. There’s no other explanation for how I was blessed with such an amazing week with such an incredible group of people. There just isn’t.
Statistically speaking, this was my third mission trip, and my first with Adventures in Mission. By this point in time, I pretty much assumed I knew what to expect, do, and get out of a mission trip… but then again, I’d never ventured a few hours west of my own hometown. My previous mission work had taken me to northern New York and eastern Tennessee. It’s one thing to see various regions of the nation—it’s completely different to see your own state in a startlingly new light. To witness an area so depressed that the only semblance of your home is found in a Sheetz store is a rude awakening… one I lived for an entire week. A week that left me never the same.
There are a lot of things I could say on what happened between those two Saturdays. How grateful a family was for my work crew to dig a drainage ditch in their yard. How over fifty teens from different home lives and backgrounds could all join together in faith at a skate park that was veiled to the world as a coffin factory. How many people traveled to the basement of a local church to get what was often their first meal of the day. But no matter how powerful and memorable those moments were to me, they aren’t what I take with me every day of my life following the return home. It was in that week where I discovered that God didn’t have to be some unknowable entity in my life—He was all around me, in the community I was serving, but more importantly, in my church family. You see, it’s unlikely that I’m going to be struck down by lightning or that the heavens will open up while I’m walking down the sidewalk. But I get see God in the people around me on a near daily basis—in my church family. When I’m confused, when I’m hurt, or when I just need someone to talk to, God is there—He just happens to be speaking through my brothers and sisters.
There are a lot of things I could’ve done in that week I was in Johnstown. But I can’t think of one that could even compare to the memories that I have from that mission trip. This week was probably one of the best of my life, and it was all because of an amazing God and the people that He has blessed me with in my life.
