Back from Chicago

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Last week I had the opportunity to co-lead our high school mission trip to Chicago. Our team consisted of 6 leaders and 15 students and I think it's safe to say we all had a blast. But as much fun as we had, that wasn't really the reason for the trip. There's something to be said about taking time away from the busyness of everyday life and immersing yourself into fellowship and service with a group of other believers. Over the last week the 21 of us grew closer to each other as well as closer to God.

When Aaron, the Director of StudentLife at our church, my good friend, and my boss, and I were talking through the reasons for this trip the biggest thing we wanted for our students were to break some preconceptions about people, specifically the homeless, and to cause our students to ask themselves what God's heart truly is. We talk so much to our students about love, heck the last post I made was about God's heart and love, and on a trip like this so often we go into it saying God show me your heart for others, teach me how to love others like you do. 

Now don't get me wrong, that's a great thing to want and it's a great thing to ask for. But it seems to me that every year on trips like these while we're there to serve people and show them how much God loves them in the midst of that we glimpse how much He really loves us. As we struggle our way through how hard it is to love other people, let alone the 20 other people you're crammed into two vans and a tiny dormitory with, we realize just how amazing it is that God truly loves us. 

We're not holy, we're not perfect, and we're surely not divine, yet somehow, when we're confronted with people who are JUST LIKE US, we feel there's no way anyone can be that ________ and still deserve our love. Go ahead and fill that blank in with whatever you want to put in there, anything fits; annoying, ugly, smelly, hateful, selfish, prejudice, mean, emotional, dirty, the list goes on and on. And yet God, who is perfect and holy and who has every right to look at us and really focus on those things, who is so righteous that those things should offend him to the point of sentencing us to death sent His Son to die for us.

We struggle to get along with one another because our lives are too messy. God sees that messiness and looking past it he sacrifices His Son, because he knows that's not all we can be. Our potential is so much more than that. We can be whole again. 

We talked last week about love, and friendship, and grace, and joy and in all honesty here on earth I think we only catch glimpses of what that really means. With our limited experiences and understanding we can't even begin to grasp the depth of which God loves us. God's love truly is unimaginable, unfathomable, and beyond our understanding. 

This last week I believe that while serving others our team of 21 broken people, caught a glimpse of God, and took one more step towards understanding His perfect love. And in my book, that's a good week.

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