It was just this Wednesday that my sister came back from a mission trip with her school to Peru. As she told the family about her experience there, I realized that although her mission trip wasn’t with CFC Youth, the experience of mission was very similar. No, I’m not talking about using the “manual flush” toilets, or not having the luxury of having air conditioning, or having to always carry around wet wipes and rolls of tissue, or having to pay a fee to use public washrooms.
In sharing our experiences with each other, it made me realize more and more that what the world needs isn’t “missionaries” who have been “trained”, but missionaries who live and love. It is a continuous conditioning from the Lord, achieved in His love, that will truly drive mission into the hearts of others. And I believe that this is what we need. What the world needs is the fulfillment of missions. Although each person has a personal vocation to live out, the one mission that we all share is the mission to love.
Ethel was placed in a village named Pacifico de Villa. It isn’t even under the Government’s system because they don’t want to take care of it. So how much of a blessing is it when students like her want to come there for a few weeks to bring support and help build foundations in this village? So inspiring! So when she spoke of her experience in Peru and how it was touching to just hug the children (despite of being told not to come in physical contact with them) and see a smile from the people in her placement, or hearing about the empathy she felt towards the elderly who cried because life was just too hard for them, it made me smile. MISSION BEGINS FROM THE HEART. And because of that, it begins with love. It IS Love. And because God is love, mission begins and continues with the Lord.
Missionaries will be called. They will be trained. They will be placed wherever they are needed, but it doesn’t mean that without missionaries, there is no mission, and it definitely doesn’t mean that without missionaries, we cannot fulfill missions. As children of God, we are born into a unifying mission… A MISSION TO LOVE. “Love one another as I have loved you.”
We are called to LOVE…
without command,
without demand,
and without self.
It is in losing my “self” that I can gain everything, for without loving God in others… without Him, I am nothing. We are called for a mission to love… we are called for a mission to Love.
“I will not bring to the Lord, that which costs me nothing.”
– 1 Chronicles 21: 24