During a year that changed my life, I spent the summer serving in China with Teen Missions International, a unique organization that provides short-term missions trip opportunities to teenagers all around the world. As a Christian, my reason for the seven-week trip was two-fold: to show God’s love to the world by serving others, and to experience spiritual and relational growth.
The year preceding the trip, I had hopelessly tangled the web of exercise, eating, and mental health with an insatiable obsession with perfection. I spent my freshman year of high school living behind a wall of shame and guilt about my disordered eating. Finally, two months before the trip, with violent emotion, I brought my whitewashed tomb to the light.
Upon examining my heart, I realized I was severely lacking in spiritual and emotional health. Physically, I was in the best shape of my life, but I was miserable. My relationships with my friends and parents were weak, I was relying on myself, and I had no true and fulfilling goal. Any goals I had were completely self-centered: to continue to be an A+ student, to continue setting personal records in track races, to continue to be healthy. Throughout those two months preceding the trip, I believe God stretched me, and with leaps and bounds I grew in understanding and spiritual maturity.
But He wasn’t done yet. From the first moment my team members and I stepped off the bus in Florida, we lived in a world both new and raw. At the Lord’s Boot Camp we trained and bonded in rugged conditions: sleeping in tents, bathing and doing laundry with buckets, sweating 24 hours of the day. The experience prepared us American teenagers to go out into the world, a world so unlike our comfortable homes and communities.
This became a challenge to my identity. Having shed the façade of the past year, I was vulnerable; having been taken outside of my world of “self” and placed on a team, I was even more so. I didn’t know who I was, and I grasped at the security of such identity. But in that formative time, my identity and appearance weren’t valued as much as my service and unity with the tam.
One challenge I had anticipated was that the food available while with Teen Missions was not the best fuel for my body. I believed that God controls the physical effects of food, sleep, and activity on my body, but the missions trip challenged my beliefs about God and health by forcing head knowledge to become life action.
“So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord.” Deuteronomy 8:3 NKJV
During the trip, I and several other team members were able to teach four English lessons, each two hours long. It was my privilege as a teacher to read daily journal entries from the Chinese students and glimpse their inner lives. The tiny, painstakingly printed words told of worth based on performance (academic and otherwise), an idea implanted by a society eager to keep up with the dynamic growth of their country. As a fellow student, I saw myself reflected far too clearly. The curriculum at the camp, however, emphasizes the students’ value as a person and reinforces their uniqueness, a lesson both I and the students learned.
By depending on God and interacting with my team and my leaders, I learned discipline, humility, and the importance of honesty. After the trip, I stopped living as if my life revolved around myself or my health. Realizing the temporality of life, I put less stock in miles ran, food eaten, grades received, and more value in long-term work. I was inspired to apply discipline to spending daily time with God, managing my schedule, and running cross-country, and I was rewarded on all fronts.
A year and a half later, the pictures, marks in my Bible, and page after page of journaling and reflections all serve to remind me of what I’ve experienced. The adventures I’ve had in the first sixteen years of my life cause me to look forward to the rest: to adventures where the work is hard and the sleep is good. As a complement to books, websites, cell phones, friends, AP classes, and race-day butterflies, the missions trip taught me how to be.
I’m really going to China! We commissioned last night, and now I am sitting in Gate 12 of the Orlando Airport, ready to fly to O’hare in Chicago and then on to Beijing.
