"Mission" Trips?

Well this is embarrassing.

I must've written down (or thought of and lost- crap!) dozens of ideas for blog entries in the past month. Some of them I even wrote a few sentences for. I just haven't really been in the mood, you know? So I apologize. Maybe August will be better. Things might skip around, but there's certainly no dearth of new ideas!

In any case, most of you (who actually hung on and still read this) know that I took two of my youth and four other adults from my church out to West Virginia last week for a "mission" trip. I put "mission" in quotes because my feelings about the week-long youth group trips to help the foreign and/or underprivileged have gotten rather confused in the past year.

When I was a youth, summer mission trips weren't really what my church was about. We definitely went to summer camp- the Bible study/devotion/quiet time/worship 8 times a day, messy games, staying in cabins kind of camp- every year, but I don't remember ever even hearing about a summer mission trip. Maybe they were there and I just couldn't afford them, but they definitely weren't regular things. When I started meeting people later in high school and in college who had gone on mission trips every summer, I was jealous. That sounded so awesome! Spending a week helping people and hanging out with my youth group friends? Yes, please.

And right there, in my own response to it, is the issue that I've become aware of after a year of youth ministry classes. How much help do we really offer in a week, and how much is the trip really just about improving relationships between and widening the awareness of the youth who go on the trip? Sure, we do a small service. We fix up a house or we sponsor a VBS or we work in a food kitchen. On my own trip last week we shingled one house, put up safety bars on the deck of a second house, and completely tore down the tiny, rotting deck and wheelchair ramp of a third to build new, safer ones. Not a bad week's work. But the real change, as I have heard in class and now seen in my own experience, is in the group that goes. Putting seven (or twenty, or fifty) people together for a week, working toward a common goal, creates a perfect environment for forming new relationships and strengthening old ones. It reminds those of us who can afford to go somewhere else and donate our time and energy for a week that we truly are privileged. But surely there are other ways of doing that, ways that don't look like the privileged reaching down to pull the lowly out of their sad lives. How arrogant are we?

So there's that argument. But the most significant change I saw this week was neither of those things. In fact, it outweighed the first and invalidated the second. There was one moment on the third day of the trip that brought it home for me, and the rest of the trip was instantly changed.

When you drive down the windy mountain roads of West Virginia the houses you see range from fairly new and beautiful to fairly near to falling down. One of the homes we worked on looked pretty nice from the outside. The woman who owned it had said that if we needed a restroom we could just come inside; we were so dehydrated from working outside all day, though, that it was the third day before I managed to keep enough water in me to actually need to take her up on it. When I did, I managed maybe three steps inside before I felt literally slammed by revelation.

This home, pretty on the outside and housing this wonderful lady and her beautiful boys, was in the process of "remodeling" on the inside. The floors were plywood. There were no doors to any of the rooms; one room didn't even have a wall. The whole place was dark. My breath caught but I managed to keep walking, use the restroom, and get back outside to process.

What this woman had done by not simply letting us rebuild her home but letting us into it was nothing less than bravely and wholeheartedly opening her life to us. The lunchtimes that we spent talking to her, playing with the boys- as one of my (extremely wise) youth said in our Mission Moment in church on Sunday, those were the most important parts of the whole trip.

See, the work that gets done on a mission trip is important. The ways that the people who go are changed are important. But the most important thing, the impetus for the change in everyone involved, is actually sharing life with someone who is nothing like you- or very much like you, after all. You can just drive down the roads past the houses, sit out on the lawns, even climb on the roofs, but it isn't until you actually go inside that being there matters. It doesn't have to be literally going inside; not everyone can or wants to open themselves up like that. But going inside that person's life, getting to know him or her as a fellow human being just trying to figure out what life is about, that is what matters.

When I went overseas for the first time two years ago, one of the things that struck me most was just that people lived there. It sounds obvious, I know, but it was a strange feeling to realize that in this city that I was just visiting for a few months, where everything was new and strange, people lived. Some of them had lived their whole lives there. People actually live all over the world and their lives look very much or nothing like mine, and I almost never stop to think about them. Now that I was there I could just sit and watch, like some crazy life-sized ant farm, or I could actually go live with them for a little while.

That, to me, is what is important about mission trips. That is the most lasting change. Sure, I put up a roof this week. But in 10 years, that will need to be fixed, maybe even replaced. And sure, I was reminded that I have a responsibility to use my privilege to make the world a better place. But I, like most people, need reminding of that pretty often. It's so much easier to just cruise. What matters, though, is that there are connections between lives that didn't exist before last week. And no, those connections may not always be strong. People get busy, people forget. But the thing is, I think what we're called to as Christians and as humans trying to make this life make sense is to make those connections to people wherever we are, whoever they are. We are called to live together, to open up our lives and our selves to one another, to have relationships that matter, and yes, to lend one another a helping hand. It's easy to take the distanced, sterile route through life, but is that really living?