I got the great opportunity last week to spend the week with a group of students serving on a mission trip to Mission Arlington. This was my 16th or 17th trip to serve at Mission Arlington, either on a Spring Break or Summer mission trip with students...After 10 or so I guess you start to lose count...Anyway, it was a fantastic week. I took a group of students from our church who had never been before and we met up with three of my former students that had done this whole thing before. Two college guys and a junior high guy who were willing to give up their spring break to come and help us serve and teach so Mission Arlington newbies the ropes. It was a fantastic week with several highlights. It was great to see our students serving outside of their comfort zones. We stayed in places they normally would not stay. We went to places they normally would not go. We interacted with people that they normally would not interact with...And in all of that, they were able to see how big and wide and deep the love of God is. Not only for them, but for a lost and hurting world that surrounds them. And they were also able to see that they can make a difference. Their life can count for something big. I think that one of the biggest problems in most churches, schools, and other institutions that deal with teenagers is that they don't challenge students to excellence. They don't challenge students to comeplety exhaust their lives for the kingdom of God, convince them that they are capable of doing it, and then give them the opportunity to do so in small ways. I believe that good student ministry is founded on missions and this was a great week to allow students to catch a small glimpse of what God can use them to do.
Another highlight of the week was in seeing how God used one of our students named Alberto. Alberto moved across the street from Johanna and I about four months ago. He started coming to our youth stuff with some friends and has been super involved ever since. He moved here from Monterrey, Mexico. Alberto wasn't planning on going on the trip until the week before we left. He got some info about it from me on Wednesday night and then his mom called us on Friday to sign him up, just two days before we left. During the afternoons at Mission Arlington we were at an apartment complex called Roger's Landing doing Rainbow Express, which is like VBS or Backyard Bible clubs. It just so happened that the vast majority of the complex was Hispanic and about half of the kids that came to the Rainbow Express only spoke Spanish! Alberto was able to translate the Bible stories without any problem and proved to be out source of communication for many of the children. That is a total God thing and it was evident to our group that God has a purpose in even the sign up list of a mission trip.
There was another highlight of the last week for me personally. I have now been involved in student ministry for just over 10 years. In those 10 years I have grown and learned a lot and continue to learn, but one of the things that I have felt most convinced and convicted of is the need to have missions as a core value of any student ministry I led. And as I have served and led over the years we have tried to make our missions emphasis not just on mission trips, but on what we are doing where God has placed us on a daily basis. Becuase of some of the missions stuff I have done in the two towns where I have lived, the guy who runs the Mission Arlington Rainbow Express things asked me to speak to all the groups that were there about how we have taken the concepts of what Mission Arlington does and have applied them to our home mission fields. I told the students, adults, and youth ministers who were there that far too many times we make missions in our youth ministries about a trip that we take somewhere. We are so willing to drive across the state or country and even fly across the world. And that is great and brings glory and honor to God. But that is not all he has called us to do. We ought to be just as willing to walk across the street, sit across the cafeteria, and drive acroos the tracks to a different part of town in our cities. God has placed us in the places we live so that we might serve him there. I got to share my heart about how we are called to live as missionaries wherever we are and not just take mission trips. After I got done a couple students and a couple adults came up and talked with me a little while about what I had shared and some of the things we had done. It was pretty cool to know that God used me and the experiences he has led us through to impact others.
Overall, it was a busy week, a tiring week, a stressful week, a crazy week, but a good week in which glory and honor and fame was brought to God. Because we went and served and sang and colored and played and knocked on doors and loved, there are people in Arlington who know God loves them in a real and practical way.
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