Each time I return from a mission trip I always hear the same three questions: “How was it? What did you do? Was there any drama?”. My response to the first question has always been positive. A simple, “It was good” tends to suffice. I think the closest anyone will ever get to a negative response about a mission trip is when someone euphemistically says, “it was tough, but I learned a lot”. I know in the past I’ve contributed to the struggles of enduring tough trips, but one week is too short, even for me, to sew discord. Maybe if I had another week my obnoxious humor could have gotten under someone’s skin and drawn out an exasperated tirade or even a few tears, but time was not on my side. Or maybe it was. I guess that depends on your perspective. The last question tends to be the easiest for me to answer, simply because it’s objective, but I found myself struggling to respond. At first I just attributed it to old age and bad memory, but as conversations continued I could clearly rehash the details of the trip. We visited churches. We did manual labor. We played with the kids. Typical missions activities. But I struggled to tie the trip together, because there was no overarching theme, at least none that I was aware of at the moment.
Throughout our time in the Yucatan, Pastor Kyle, our missionary contact, kept apologizing for it not being a typical mission trip. I have only been on a couple other trips prior. So I am definitely not some seasoned veteran with a broad experience of short term missions, but in the moment, it felt like any other trip. It was only after I struggled through conversations about it and took the time to process it that I realized the subtle difference. On previous trips overseas there always seemed to be an extra bit of attention centered upon the presence of foreigners. But this time around things were different. The team was never made to be a focal point. Pastor Kyle merely absorbed us into his schedule, kept the focus on the Gospel, and exposed us to a glimpse of what his daily life as a missionary involved. He was transparent and genuine. Often abrasive, but never with ill will or discontent. He desired to challenge us, to light a fire under us that would fill us with the urgency of the gospel that mirrored his own. He exposed us to being missional rather than being on missions.
When I think back on Mexico and the mission trip, the thing that best reflects my experience – this is the part where I’m supposed to reference a Bible verse – is actually the meme with Ice Cube. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the meme and memes general, it’s an image of Ice Cube driving with two lines of text. The bottom line of text is always the same, “today was a good day”, while the top line is usually some sort of event that took place. An example of something that would go on top would be, “it’s 9am and I haven’t changed a diaper yet”, followed by “today was a good day” at the bottom. The examples that truly capture the essence of the meme are ones that show a relatively menial event on top, but when viewed in the context of a preceding caption, shed a completely different light on the matter. Obviously this was written by a parent of a newborn child. This is how I felt about the trip in Mexico and being missional in general. The things that we did, in and of themselves, were nothing extraordinary. We visited churches. We did manual labor. We played with the kids. But when viewed in the light of the Gospel the days were so satisfying. I Corinthians 10:31 states, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God”. Every night I would collapse into bed exhausted, and no matter how mundane the tasks of the day were, because I knew they brought glory to God, I went to bed knowing that “today was a good day”.