My first home away from home was in Mexico City, and in a week, I’m going back.
I believe that the most important lesson my parents ever taught me growing up, and continue to teach me now, is that I should never be content where I’m at. It was a lesson that was, I’m sure, meant to be applied to my spiritual life, and my relationship with God. I understood that, and I have seen them live it out in a way that I aspire to, especially over the last ten years. A part of me, though, has taken that in a much more literal sense, and it has led to a fair amount of globetrotting and as many weekend getaways as I’m able to shoehorn into my schedule. I don’t believe we were made to wander in circles around the same city for our entire lives, just as we weren’t made to remain stagnant in our faith. Ten years ago, I had no idea just how closely tied together those two applications would become.
In 2009, my parents led their first short term mission trip to Ninos de Mexico. At the time, I was fifteen and didn’t think much of it. I wasn’t old enough to go, and even if I had been, the idea of it didn’t really interest me. Traveling internationally was never something we had been able to do, and in my mind, there was more than enough to see in the States that I didn’t really need to look any further. I didn’t understand just how big of a step of faith it was for them to volunteer to lead this trip, even after they came back and told my sister and I all about the experience. This was before I had really begun to take my faith seriously, and after a few weeks, I had all but forgotten about it.
The opportunity to apply for the next trip came two years later, during my senior year of high school. It came during that time of life where everyone was trying to figure out what came next. Where do you want to go to college? What do you want to study? Where do you want to work? And other such questions that I had no real answers for. When I would talk to my parents about it, the idea of not being content was a fairly consistent theme. They would talk about using my interests (whatever those were) for something bigger than myself. They were the first ones that suggested I consider working for a Christian non-profit, but that didn’t sound very appealing to me. The trip to Mexico came up a lot in these conversations as well, and eventually I decided to sign up, if for no other reason than to mark another thing off my good Christian checklist.
That decision changed my entire life.
I spent a week, during the summer between high school and college, falling in love with the orphanage, falling in love with Mexico and its culture, and falling in love with missions. I learned what it meant for God to break my heart for what breaks His, as I learned the history of some of the children there. The tragic situations they had been taken from before ending up in the orphanage were heartbreaking, but they made the rest of their stories so much more beautiful. I learned what it meant to have true joy in Christ, that was not dependent on the material, because they had almost nothing to call their own. Their joy came as a direct result of being surrounded by people – house parents and other staff at the orphanage – who lived it out for them to see daily. I learned from those people what it meant to care for the orphans as Jesus did, in a way that was not in the least bit self-serving. They were, and are, giving everything they have to serve and care for the children there, and they are some of the most inspirational people I have ever met.
I learned all of those things on the first day I spent there, and I continued learning them every day that followed. From that first day, I knew that I had to come back, and it had to be for longer than a week. Two years later I was heading back as an intern for an entire summer, where God taught me all of those lessons all over again and on a much larger scale. I got to know the kids on a much more personal level than I was able to before, as I lived with them and became a part of their family. I was able to meet a new team from the States every week that came down to serve, and I was able to watch as people on those teams fell in love with missions for the first time just like I had. Every day I spent there, God was telling me that I was right where I needed to be.
It took three years, but I was eventually able to go back a third time last summer, and my fourth trip is coming up in just under a week. As with every time I make this trip, I am full of excitement to see how God will use me and the team I am with through the work that we do and through our interactions with the children and staff. I am excited to work with a team, made up half of people who have gone with me before, and half who are going for the first time. For the former, I am excited to see the connections with the kids pick up right where they left off the last time, and for the latter I am excited to watch as they fall in love with this place right alongside us. Any nervousness or reservations I had during the buildup to my first trip have long since dissipated, and I am left only with the anticipation of returning to the first place outside of Spokane that felt like home.
I am convinced that this place will always be a part of my life in some form or another. This is where my passion for missions was born, and the job that I have working for a Christian non-profit is a direct result of this passion. The decision to follow the career path in non-profit was one that I made during that first weeklong trip, and one that I never second-guessed during my six years in college pursuing it
The missions journey that I have been on since my first time in Mexico has reinforced, time and time again, the idea that I should never be content. My parents have been teaching me that for my entire life, but it took until that first real step outside my comfort zone for me to truly understand what it meant. Learning to live that out has been a process – one that has no real finish line. It is a lesson that I will need to keep relearning, and one that will, undoubtedly, take me places that I never dreamed I would go. The next step in that process is the World Race, which again, is something that I never would have considered had it not been for my experience in Mexico. I don’t believe that it was a coincidence that my first time hearing about it came just a few short months after returning home from my first trip. God’s timing is perfect, and I am beyond excited to see how He works through the rest of this journey.
“You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart will always be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of knowing and loving people in more than one place.”
