Where are you going for Spring Break?

Work team season is here. Spring break in North America means that thousands of students and their leaders will embark on a short-term mission experience to different places, through different organizations, and a lot of them will come to serve alongside Young Life in the Dominican Republic and Central America. A typical work team is a one week experience, with a chance to work either at a Young Life camp or a neighborhood, doing construction projects, and possibly a homestay with local families. Also it might mean you get to see an amazing beach in the Caribbean, or take a hike up a  volcano, or see the Panama Canal.

Working at Pico

There has been plenty written about the good, the bad, and the validity of short-term mission trips - I won't go there now. If you are interested in a good read about service in other cultures, though, I find this article very insightful. What I would like to focus on in this post is what it means for us to enter this season of the year.

YL Athens leaders working in Panama

Homecoming. For us, it is a season of friends coming back to their hometown. Except it's not their hometown, but ours. Yet, for a lot of folks, the place where they go year after year has become a second hometown. And for us, it feels like they are coming home, too-  we have kept in touch, we have exchanged plenty of messages throughout the year, learned about their family struggles, and they have prayed for ours. We are just happy to be able to see those familiar faces again.

Chickenman. OK, the official name is Gilberto's Pica Pollo, but the Chickenman, which up until last year consisted of a street cart with plastic chairs and tables set up on the sidewalk, is the place to get the best fried chicken (I won't say ever, because there are Guatemalans in this family, and also a southern man, so talking about best fried chicken can get personal). But, every week, there will be a dinner out there, and youbetcha the Cliffords are joining you.

Our inbox goes out of control. For Roy, it is a six-week-extravaganza of work teams coming and going through camp, and he is directly involved in the preparing and on-site work. For me, doing operations in Central America, it means that I get to be in the loop for every team going through our region. My involvement varies. In some countries, we have a large team of staff who handle all of the logistics. In other countries, however, we may only have one or two people on staff, and this means I end up helping coordinate transfers, schedules, and different details.

Rebe showing how to hang up clothes in Guatemala.

We get a new perspective. We get to see our normal day-in day-out in ministry from a different perspective - what a week out of the ordinary is for our friends. It is normal life for us, so we gain a window of objectivity about our local ministries. The questions asked about how or why things work a certain way give us a chance to step back and evaluate what we do, how, and why.

We run a tight ship. Even though as a family we are pretty flexible, there is no way we can do this without set schedules, clear communication, and very realistic expectations. Sometimes, it will mean I am working at midnight. Sometimes, it means Roy starts working really early. Sometimes one of us misses a meal. And we guard our "time off" more closely.

Our life is fuller. Because in the midst of all the emails, and the delayed flights, the moments when you hear your self saying (again) "I don't think it's a good idea for you to pet the stray dogs," the crazy schedules, the fact that people want to not only see but be part of our life here is a huge encouragement.

So, if you are about to go on a work trip, or at some point decide to go on one: First of all, thank you! Thank you for taking your vacation time to come and get your self all muddied up. We are really excited that you are here. Second, as my friend Chepe Verde used to say, I invite you to not see this as an opportunity to do good work, or to build bridges between cultures, or to help the needy - as great as those things are. I invite you to take the unfamiliarity, all the joy, all the filth, all the sweat - everything about your week - as a chance to follow Christ. Welcome the disorientation, the fact that you are away from comforting places and routines, the fact that you will not be able to communicate effectively, the frustration, as a place of reflection. Pay attention to whatever God is doing in your life, and keep paying close attention to it during the week.