Lessons Learned in the Van

I've always loved road trips.  I love packing the car to best utilize every square inch of space.  I love putting together a snack box to treat myself to fresh fruit or veggies halfway down the road.  I even love the crappy gas station coffee as I watch the sun rise over the highway after driving for 3 hours.  I love making long playlists for different moods of the road:  mellow for the very beginning of the trip, but building quickly into golden classic rock songs to belt out as the highway stretches on to the horizon.  Or maybe I'm the only one who does that...that's okay too.

This past weekend, I got to drive down to El Paso with my church.  28 of us from our church piled into SROM's 2 new (used) 15-passenger vans early last week and started the 14-hour drive down south.  It reminded me a bit of the many hours I spent in similar vans on youth group trips in high school!  It was a great opportunity to get to connect with people in my church that I previously hadn't had a chance to get to know very well.  (It's amazing how quickly you can get to know people when you're crammed in the back seat together fighting the beginnings of feeling carsick.)

We arrived in Texas around 7:30pm on Thursday night and were warmly greeted by our church family in El Paso.  As exhausted as we were from the road trip, it was such a joy to connect and mingle with brothers and sisters in El Paso, from Kansas City, and from Fort Collins.  Even now as I reflect on it, our church family network is pretty amazing!  Ray, the pastor in El Paso, stood up to welcome us, orient us on the building we were staying in, and give us a basic schedule for the weekend (a very basic and very flexible schedule).  

Our Laramie church family had planned on going to Juarez to work with a children's ministry on Friday afternoon, which gave us time to solidify plans on Friday morning.  We also had an amazing time of prayer and worship on the roof of the school building!  It was amazing to get to look over the city of El Paso, and then turn and look over the border to Juarez.  We prayed for our time there and for the ministries on both sides of the Rio.  Piling again into our trusty vans, we crossed quickly over into Mexico and jumped in to help with the kids.  

I've done children's ministry in Hispanic cultures before, and every time I deeply wish I could speak Spanish!  But I'm also reminded of the love language of kids: playing.  We set up different games for the kids, had a puppet show, and painted faces, all with the heart to just love on the kids as much as we could!  I got to work at the face painting table, and quickly memorized the three most popular requests:  mariposa (butterfly), estrella (star), and corazón (heart).  As the afternoon passed, I slowly started remembering little bits and pieces of the Spanish I've collected from past trips...and it's amazing how quickly I forget them again!  

Saturday we split up and worked at two food distributions that the church in El Paso runs.  We spent the first two hours packing food into plastic bags for people to pick up as they came through.  The actual distribution is open from 10-12 the first Saturday of every month, and serves about 300 people at each location every month.  Along with caring for the physical needs of providing food, the church also offers to pray for each person that comes through.  Many smile, thank us for the food, and decline prayer.  But there are several who came through who eagerly accepted prayer.  Ray coached us to not fall into the trap of simply praying for their immediate situation (for a sickness, for provision of a job, for the healing of a family member).  He reminded us that the greatest thing we can offer them is Jesus, and it is Jesus who works all things (including immediate challenges and trials) together for His glory and His kingdom.

As we were packing the food, I kept thinking about Mary and Martha preparing for Jesus and his disciples.  I am a Martha by nature...I'm most comfortable being busy and packing the food and getting things done.  It's much harder for me to be Mary and to be content to simply sit at Jesus' feet and love as he loved:  without a schedule.  Once we were done packing and the people started coming in for the food distribution, there wasn't much for me to do other than smile and welcome them, and thank them for coming.  The entire time, my internal thoughts were running along the lines of "Is this really the best use of my time?  Aren't there other projects I could be working on?  What else can I be doing?"  But Jesus doesn't call us to always be doing.  He calls us to love the person in front of us.  And loving people means stopping myself from seeing people as another project to add to our missions trip to justify the long drive and the expense, and to look them in the eye and love them as Jesus loved them.  Without agenda, without impatience, without busyness.

Spending 14+ hours each way in a van provides ample time for reflection (another thing that I love about road trips).  As we were driving back on Sunday, I thought about what my agenda had been for the weekend, and what ended up being God's agenda.  The leadership in my church had much less of a project mentality, and much more of a person mentality.  We went to El Paso to connect with our church family and to support them in their ministry.  We didn't go so we could leave feeling like we had accomplished some sort of project; we didn't go because the church in El Paso needed us for any project of labor.  We went because they are our family, and we love them.