When I say “mission trip,” what do you think of? Probably Africa or Mexico or somewhere in the Caribbean. Your mind immediately jumps to images of malnourished children, homeless men and villages in the middle of now where.

Now what comes to mind when I say “New York”? You’re probably picturing the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, or any number of other things pertaining to the second largest city in the work only to Tokyo. Or maybe you imagine the beaches of Long Island or the mountains upstate. I would bet money that the farthest term from your mind would be “mission site.” But what if it was just that?

I am from Long Island, New York. I my house is a 40-minute train ride away from the city. When my church’s high school youth group went on their annual mission trip, it was always to some far off place in need: Missouri to rebuild after a tornado, the run-down region of Appalachia in West Virginia, an orphanage in the Bahamas. So imagine our confusion when our youth pastor told us that we would be spending a week serving this summer in the Rockaways -- on Long Island. Mutiny, of course, ensued with students complaining that it wasn’t a “real” mission trip and that they wanted to go somewhere new and exciting. I’ll be the first to say I was more than a little disappointed. What about the children in Haiti that needed clean water? Or the starving kids of Mexico? My peers and I so quickly forgot that our own neighbors were in need, and we are called to love our neighbor as ourselves.

The previous fall, New York was hit by Hurricane Sandy. Sure, New York gets blasted with snow every winter, and we are no strangers to the heat, hurricanes are something we just are no used to. When this category 2 storm hit us, it knocked us down hard. Everyone on Long Island was affected, be it power outages that lasted for two weeks, school closings for five days, or in the most extreme cases, complete home destruction. By the spring everyone in my area had recovered, the minimal damages fixed, and the storm was just a blip in our past. How could we be devoting our entire summer mission trip to this thing that came and went so long ago? What we were all to naïve and selfish to realize was that while our area of the island had recovered, others had not, in particular the Rockaways.

The Rockaways is a peninsula on Long Island but considered to be a part of Queens. Because it is surrounded by water on three sides, the damages from the hurricane in the area were immense. Houses were flooded up to the second story; cars floated away; the water swept people’s possessions out of their homes, never to be seen again. One small area within the Rockaways is Breezy Point, a beautiful, friendly, tightknit beach neighborhood. Because electric currents in Breezy point were never turned off during the storm, when they came in contact with the seawater, fire started and quickly spread through the entire community, leaving 150 homes destroyed by the flames. By the end of the storm hundreds of houses were gone or nearly gone, nearly 50 people had been killed, and hundreds more had forever lost the lives they once knew. These families living a mere 20 minutes away from us were still hurting, still trying to piece together their lives, yet we had been so eager to hop on a plane to serve some strangers thousands of miles away. Once it was put in this perspective, we know God needed us to serve in The Rockaways that summer.

And so in July of 2013, more than 50 students and 11 leaders from Living Faith Christian Church drove down the familiar roads to bring us to the Rockaways. There our groups were assigned to five different families who nearly a year after the storm were still in the process of rebuilding their homes and lives. One woman was fighting to not have her family home of generations condemned due to unsafe structure. It took a lot of prayer, but it was decided she would be allowed to keep it if the proper reconstruction was done -- we got to be a part of that construction. One man’s house desperately needed to be re-sided, and we were there to do that for him. One family’s backyard was still in shambles with their garage barely still standing. We completely removed the unsafe structure and put in brand-new gorgeous PVC fencing. Two years later we invited back to this family’s home for a backyard barbeque- we barely recognized the beautiful patio and gardens they had installed after our work. And we also barely recognized them with their beaming smiles, smiles that we did not get to see because two years prior as they still worried about the future of their home. At the visit two years later, God made it clear that He really did need us there that summer in 2013.

Beyond the material healing God did through my team that week, He was able to work through a group of students as they led a young man to accept Jesus Christ into his heart as his Lord and Savior. After suffering from depression before the storm and the storm’s complications exacerbating his stress, he often found himself in a state he did not want to be. But through these student’s own testimonies, he felt God tugging on his heart and telling him to cast his cares on Him and allow him to lead his life. I am still friends with this man on social media accounts and it fills my heart with joy to see that he is happy, employed, and recently married. I can’t help but wonder if my team had a small part to do with this. I know God makes whatever he wants to happen, happen, but how amazing it is that we were able to be His hands and feet through His process.

The Rockaways was not your typical mission trip. We were not in a new and unfamiliar land helping “those less fortunate.” We were three towns from home helping the people our parents may work with. Helping the man that goes to the same beach as us. Talking with the woman who went to high school with our mom. Rebuilding houses that we may drive past again on any given day. And I feel that this made the trip all the more powerful. We now see that at any moment, our lives could be turned upside down, that bad things can happen to people like us, and that one day we may be the one’s in need, and that’s okay. We also walked away with a whole new perspective on the term that “life is a mission trip.” We learned that you don’t need to travel to be on a mission trip. Your environment is a mission site. There are people all around you in need everyday and everywhere. People you can pray for, people you can witness too, people you can assist in the smallest or biggest ways. In everything you do there is a way to spread Christ’s light, you just need to look for it.