It’s summer ya’ll. While this means extreme heat, lake days, ice cream, and no school (hopefully) it’s also a breeding ground for vacations and mission trips. Scrolling through Facebook I’m sure you have seen countless posts about many mission trips building churches or school buildings, playing soccer with some kids, or hugging widowed women. These things surface our feed without us really having any context behind them. There is so much more behind these photos -- experiences, emotions, longing, and friendships. I hope that opening up context may influence you on how you see mission and humanitarian work, and possibly stir you enough to try it our for yourself.

Mission work is highly misconstrued in the detailed view. Yes, in general, everyone appreciates it’s value, but when people start going deeper into a mission’s objective, questions start to arise. How much work can you really do in a week? Will building relationships with kids only hurt them once you leave? Do you really want to introduce all of these gifts to them, especially gifts that they can’t get again once it’s gone? There are some discrepancies among mission trips and humanitarian groups, but one thing is simple. American teams learn from other cultures and other cultures learn from American teams. The most important part of a trip is to build relationships with people you came to see, whether it be in your own community or people half way across the world. Sure, many relationships won’t last a lifetime (it’s pretty hard to keep in contact with someone in a remote village), but the memory does. The love you can share in a week has an impact beyond words. Wherever I am, I can always picture where my prayer family, Marianna and Quincy, are. I can see their white, cement house laid in rocks, the baby kittens that walk around their area, the countless other children who run up and down the alley, and the plastic, white chairs outside of their house where we all sat and met each other for the first time. I can also see the Polaroid photo of us together in their bedroom, just like mine that sits next to my bed. The hugs and conversations I have shared with them have stuck with me each day. Even though we only met for a short time, their presence in my life has become constant. Meeting Haitians is not like meeting a random guy at a Taylor Swift concert. Every experience is so much more raw than the average meet and greet in America.

Love is real and love is powerful for every single Haitian or Kenyan or Guatemalan you meet. One week can make an extraordinary difference on your life and the life of others. Mission trips are not just pictures of cute kids or posed building shots --it's leaving your heart in an area and keeping someone else's heart with you at all times.