Islego Ministries | Minivans Are Hot

July 8, 2013 by Kelli

“How long do the soles on these shoes last?” I asked the sales girl nervously. I stepped from one foot to the next, rocking side to side as if the room were moving and I wanted to steady it.

“Well, I don’t know,” she answered. “I imagine they last quite awhile. These are good shoes.”

“Oh…” I paused awkwardly, trying to remember the things I’d been taught about sharing my faith with strangers. I needed a unique way to start the conversation, but this suddenly felt like it was going a very strange direction. Taking a deep breath I decided to plunge forward with the plan.

“Did-you-know-we-have-souls-that-will-never-die-and-that-Jesus-died-on-the-cross-for-us-so-we-could-live-eternally-with-Him?!” I sort of blurted the sentence out, a verbal vomit that left the poor sales girl looking entirely confused. Were we talking about shoes or were we talking about Jesus?

WHO COULD TELL!

This story is not one of my finer moments in life, though I will say the sales girl in Payless was extremely kind. She put her arm around my shoulder, thanked me for being bold enough to share my faith and asked me if I really needed any shoes. I didn’t so on I moved.

This was part of a mission weekend with my church youth group. The premise behind the weekend was a good one – let’s teach young people how to be bold in sharing their faith. I have no problem with this message and I am grateful that it was taught to me.

But the practice of sharing our faith is so much more effective when it’s actually lived out in front of people, isn’t it? Canvasing malls and neighborhoods and beach boardwalks yields little effect for so many reasons. One, it’s just plain awkward. There’s nowhere to go with a conversation that messily tries to equate the soles of shoes to the souls of man and then throws Jesus inside that blender for a healthy little punch.

Although you absolutely can feel free to pat me on the back for my clever little play on words there, thankyouverymuch.

There’s a lot of negativity surrounding the idea of short term mission trips that floats around the internet. I get where it’s coming from, I really do. Much of it is written by people who grew up a lot like I did, in a day when short term missions was often defined as dropping a group of youth students on the side of the road in matching t-shirts, hands stuffed with the Four-Spiritual Laws, hell bent on saving people’s ~~soles~~ souls.

There was little sacrifice to be made in such endeavors. In fact, two hours of “sharing your faith” on a sandy beach often yielded a full day of play time and boy did you feel good about yourself because you shared Jesus that morning, yo!

A short term mission trip should serve only to bolster the local church or a local body of believers that can continue the work that was supported by a mission’s team. It does no one any good for a group of people to descend upon them for two weeks like a spiritual tornado if there is no one left behind to help explain what all the pieces of this faith mean. Throwing Jesus at someone who’s stomach is empty, who’s house is made of nothing but sticks and corregated metal, will more often than not be an empty Jesus.

Short term mission trips must meet the physical needs of those they’ve come to serve, and not at the detriment of the local economy. Don’t take away work from the locals. Don’t try to serve Jesus verbally to children who are starving, to mothers whose hands are raw from digging and working and scraping the ground in order to put something in their children’s stomachs.

Show them Jesus by meeting their needs. Serve, backs bent over, next to the day laborers. Relieve their burden, feed their stomachs, hug the children who ache for physical touch. Be Jesus. Be His Hands as you serve them, His Feet as you walk next to those in such desperate need. And when you leave, make sure the local church is empowered so that they can tell the people who Jesus is and give evidence of His Love for them.

There are so many organizations that are doing this well – so many people who are coming alongside local churches and communities and orphanages all over the world and bolstering them in the areas of physical need so that they can more readily meet the spiritual needs of their own communities. If you’re looking for an organization to support and perhaps even take a short term mission trip with, start by looking at one of these organizations. While there are many doing this very thing, I can personally endorse two of them if you are looking for an organization to join on a short term mission trip.

Servant’s Heart Ministry is based out of Nashville and they work primarily in Dominican Republic right now. They are doing just what I laid out – they work closely with local pastors in the villages they serve to make sure that the children are getting what they need from a physical standpoint (food, proper nutrition, health care and dental care) and they are telling the children that they aren’t forgotten by God.

IsleGo Ministries is working to connect the Church as one body all over the globe. They work closely with churches all over the world, but most specifically in the Caribbean. IsleGo takes hundreds of families, pastors, youth and college students every year to their numerous established locations where they work to meet the needs of the local people, to connect hearts with one another and to strengthen the Church as a whole.

Both of these organizations are doing short term mission not just right, but extremely well. And for those of you with young children, both of these organizations offer short term mission trips for families with children as young as 5, and what a blessing it is to serve alongside your young children.

I know this post was long so thanks for sticking with me. What are your thoughts on short term mission trips? How have you seen lives impacted by a short term mission?

Lemonade for Haiti

July 13, 2010 by Kelli

“Mom! Can I clean the bathroom?”

“Uh…sure,” I reply, trying to keep my jaw from dropping to the floor.

“Will you pay me a dollar?”

Ah yes. The catch.

“Why should I pay you a dollar?” I ask. “The bathroom is dirty because you made it dirty. Don’t you think you should clean it up for free?”

“But I want to raise money to send to children in Haiti!”

“Oh. Well, I guess you can have a dollar then.”

“Great! After that I’m going to go around the neighborhood and knock on people’s doors and see if I can walk their dogs to earn money for Haiti. I want to get $111.00.”

I start calculating how many miles he’s going to have to walk to come up with that money. It doesn’t seem entirely realistic. “Hey bud,” I call to my laboring son. “Come here – I have an idea.”

And thus was birthed the idea for the lemonade stand for Haiti.

I haven’t put on a lemonade stand since I was a kid myself. And it ended…poorly. I was eleven-ish and we lived in a brand new St. Louis subdivision. The neighbors across the street joined me and together we made up lemonade and situated ourselves on the street in front of some new construction. We figured the builders would like to come buy our lemonade.

But they didn’t. Despite our shrills screeches for LEMONAAAAAAAADE!!!!

So we put our heads together and came up with a solution to make more money. My neighbor ran over to her house and raided her parents garage refridgerater. She came out moments later dragging a cooler filled with…beer.

We commenced to shouting: LEMONAAAAADE…BEEEEEER!

And lo and behold, the builders flocked to us. We sold several cans of beer and were racking in the dough when her dad came tearing acorss the yard. The construction workers scattered.

“What are you doing?” he stammered.

“We’re selling lemonade and beer,” we said proudly. “We’re making a lot of money.”

“Girls!” he cried. “This is illegal. You can’t sell beer.”

And that was the last time I worked a lemonade stand.

Despite the popularity of the beer, I refrained from suggesting to Sloan the illegal selling of alcohol. Instead we kept it innocent – lemonade and chocolate chip cookies. I also did the smart thing and put out the word on Facebook and Twitter. Thank you to the sweet friends who came out and supported my tender hearted sons’ dream. You helped him reach his goal and more.

The neighbor kids joined us in flagging down passing cars. Unfortunately there was a competing stand down the road, but that didn’t hamper the spirits of the kids. They waved, they jumped and flapped their arms like chickens, all the while screeching LEEEEEMONADE!

And people, when they discovered that we were accepting donations for this organization, were extremely generous, paying five, ten and in one case forty, dollars for a glass of lemonade and a freshly baked cookie.

I was humbled as I watched Sloan work so hard to earn money. Earlier that weekend, I had taken him to Target to use a gift card he got for his birthday. He had his wallet with him and in his wallet was $20. His gift card had $15 on it. He saw several toys that he wanted that were more than $15. I never said a word to him, I wanted to see how he would respond.

He refused to spend that $20. “That’s the money for Haiti,” he told me. And he picked out a smaller toy and a pack of gum instead. Where did this child of mine come from? It’s humbling to me. There is often an ugliness in my heart that crops up when the need to give presents itself. I get fearful that by giving away my money I may potentially not have what I need (or want) somewhere down the road. So to see my seven year old give with reckless abandon, not caring about what he might be sacrificing, I was floored.

And honored. Honored to be his mom. Ashamed of my own ugliness. Excited to help him work to earn $111.00.

Who wouldn’t want to buy a glass of lemonade from a face like this?

We were out there about an hour and a half before the sky started to fall. As the rain fell, we grabbed our stuff and rushed home where we counted our money. $120. He reached his goal.

“Oh wait!” Sloan cried as we sat on the floor with the money. He rushed to his wallet and grabbed the money out of it. “I want to put this in.”

Lee and I looked at each other and back at Sloan, his big blue eyes so sweet and big. “You know what, buddy,” Lee said. “Why don’t you keep it.”

We went on to explain how God blesses a cheerful giver and we thought that Sloan deserved to keep the money he had already earned as a blessing for his heart.

“Well, can I put some of it in for the children in Haiti?” Sloan asked.

“You can put all of it in, if you really want to,” Lee said. “But if you want to keep it, you have our permission.”

He thought about it for a minute and took out five dollars. “I want to give some of it to Haiti,” he said.

And then together as a family, we prayed a blessing over this jar of money – and over a certain seven year old who taught me quite a bit in the span of one day.

Blessings.