A new home - Sara Eustice-Brown

There are many interesting things that happen when you take youth away from home for nine days on a mission trip. There is of course the bonding that happens. We share experiences during our trips that become stories we tell and re-tell over and over. The youth that go on the trip always have special jokes, catch phrases that were invented on the long road trip, and stories that other people who weren’t there just don’t understand.
        You also have the giving up of creature comforts for the trip. Cell phones are locked away, hair dryers are left behind at home in bathroom cupboards, iPods are left on nightstands untouched, and lengthy showers are replaced with 5 minute ones in community pools or homeless shelter’s
bathrooms.
        We also end up meeting new people, both the people we serve and the youth from other church’s who serve alongside us. For a week we live with people that under no other circumstances we would reside with. Because of this we learn a lot about each other, our pasts, what annoys each other, and what we all look like in the morning after sleeping on an air mattresses.
        All of these things combine to create a sort of temporary community for the time we are away. We develop routines for the “new life”. Coffee on the “veranda”  (it was really a junky balcony overlooking some astro turf) in San Diego, daily visits to the Blue Sky market to get fresh made
tortillas in Yakima each afternoon. Everything we know from home has been left behind and replaced with foreign things and people. I always start to feel like my old life, back in Portland is gone and that my new life is living at church full of youth, that this is the new permanent set up for things.  There is something really awesome about not worrying about anything each day other than serving God and spending time with Him. On the trip I don’t think about cleaning my house, or the bills that need to get paid, honestly I don’t think about money at all. There isn’t any worry about planning the next event for church, or what to make for dinner. All the daily tasks are set aside, left at home.  Even family worries are for the time put on the back burner. I guess that’s how every day should be though, not just days on the mission trip. I should be better about setting aside the things that need to get done, the worries, and frustrations of life and be more willing to focus on what really matters loving people, and loving God.