Are you having trouble planning this year’s vacation? Instead of using your vacation days to plan a trip to the beach, you can use them to travel to a new country and help people in need on a mission trip. A mission trip takes a group on a journey to help less fortunate areas and provide them with materials, labor, and faith. The activities on mission trips can vary from building an orphanage to feeding the impoverished to just spending time with a family. This is what you can expect to experience while on your mission trip:
Togetherness
A group on either a short-term or long-term mission trip can experience many different things. Whether it’s building a house, playing games, or traveling, everything is done together. It builds a community within this mission group and bonds them not only to each other but to the community in which they are helping.
Broaden Perspectives
Reading a newspaper every day can keep you updated on what is going on in the world, but a mission trip helps you experience what is really happening. Reading that kids in Central America don’t have anywhere to live doesn’t quite hit you until you visit the poverty-stricken town. You can begin to understand that it isn’t just a newspaper article or a commercial asking to give 50 cents a month. It is a town like your own, struggling in this world, needing help that you can provide.
Challenging Comfort Zones
Mission trips will demand a lot from you, from getting up the courage to leave your home for weeks at a time to build a house for homeless orphans. The extent of the trip can be challenging. You will be experiencing new cultures, new skills, and new people every day of your trip. Your mission trip will certainly push you out of your comfort zone in several ways. It can also bring a new demand to your faith that is practiced outside the walls of your church. Your spirituality can be brought forth by your actions in the real world and not just be confined to sermons every Sunday.
Empowerment
Being able to share God’s faith is an empowering event. You can find many possibilities for the future and develop a passion for the work you have done. Not only can you find these things, but mission trips give you the ability to pursue them. Mission trips show the capabilities of people and the good they can provide in the world by delivering it with the help and the faith it needs.
To learn more about places where you can go on mission trips, read Glenn Duker’s blog, Where Should Your Next Mission Trip Be To.
