Mission Minded (Lessons from Panama)

                For the past week and a half since returning from my mission trip in Panama City, I’ve been trying to process my experience and find the words to describe what occurred there. After trying and failing to compile all of the events and lessons into an eloquent discourse, I have decided to just share the experiences individually and to not worry about creating a story from them.  After all, even if the individual pieces do not seem to be related to each other, they serve to build up one testimony of what God has done.

                As my team and I prepared to leave on our trip, there were two separate passages of scripture that God continually placed on my heart. Throughout the trip, I was able to see both of these passages fulfilled, leaving me with greater clarity about the character of God. The first passage is Ephesians 4:3-6, which says to “make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one spirit – just as you were called to one hope when you were called – one lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”

                I did not fully grasp how necessary unity is in life until I stepped into this massive undertaking of a mission trip, which included ministry and intercession in several dozen schools as well as a conference for several thousand girls to combat abuse and sex trafficking. The joining together of all of our teams, which amounted to about 160 team members, showed me firsthand how crucial dying to yourself is in order to create something that is more powerful than what you could offer on your own. In constantly being reminded that this endeavor was not about me or for me, I was able to experience the beauty of unselfishly working for somebody else’s dream -which was in turn actually God’s vision and dream. As every member of every team continually did this, the feeling of genuinely becoming a family took over, even in spite of our annoyances, complaints, and struggles. We were one body serving with the power of one Spirit toward one hope of a successful conference, all in the name of our one Father. I experienced in a greater magnitude than ever before God’s perfect design of a body building itself up toward Him. It was beautiful.         
              One other way that God demonstrated to me the glory of being a united body was through the testimonies of different team members that were shared. In my hotel room, my roommates and I shared our insecurities and fears about ourselves that resulted from things we had done or been through in our lives. Later on, individuals from other churches shared their testimonies at school ministry sessions and revealed struggles with cutting, abuse, self- hatred, doubting the love of God, pornography use, and the like. I saw that in this body, this single body of Christ that we all create together, we go through many of the same issues and the same defeats. The myriad of examples of defeat and the countless testimonies of overcoming those struggles reminded me that I am not the darkest, and I am not defeated, and I am not the dirtiest child of God that somehow fell way below the others.  Likewise, my testimony reminded others that I am just as much of a flawed and imperfect lover of Christ as they perceived themselves to be. By sharing with each other, we were able to eradicate the delusion of shame and insecurity. 

               The second portion of scripture God placed on my heart was Luke 10:17-20 which states “the seventy-two returned with joy and said ‘Lord, even the demons submit to us in Your name!’ Jesus replied, ‘I saw Satan fall like lightning from Heaven. I have given you the authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you. However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rather rejoice that your names are written in Heaven.’” Before I left for Panama, this gave me hope because it reminded me of the authority that we are given in Christ. I thought that I saw this scripture completely fulfilled when, the day before our conference began, one of our teams cast a demon out of a young girl. The girl had  manifested the demonic spirit of Jezebel, and the team had to join together in the trying experience of casting it out. When I first heard the story, I was reminded of this section of scripture and was satisfied with the surface illustration of how we have authority over spirits because of Jesus. Later on that night however, I realized that I had more to learn from this passage.

                 That night, after finding out the details of the experience, my roommates and I were tense and we sat awake in our hotel room discussing the spiritual warfare that was happening and wondering what demonic activity would happen next (before this experience, many of us had been facing other types of intense warfare). Eventually, we stopped and realized that we should be more fixated on the amazing  fact that Jesus is still the same today as He was when He walked the earth. I realized that my flesh was engrossed by the disturbing acts of the devil, and as a result, was glorifying them by giving them attention. However, my spirit was reminding me to worship the work of the living God. It’s so easy for us to get drawn into the more macabre events because our flesh is fascinated by it, but I was reminded in that moment that the work of God is so much more compelling and alluring. The unchanging proof of God's faithful character and behavior is boundlessly worthier of scrutiny than the failed attempts of the enemy.  For me, this realization mirrored the scripture portion where Jesus tells us not to fixate on the spirits, but to rejoice because He has written our names in Heaven. No matter what we experience, good or bad, focusing on anything more than God's glory is simply a misuse of time.

                The last word that God spoke to me both before and during our trip was a phrase that I did not thoroughly comprehend immediately. It first emerged during my team’s boot camp meeting a week before we left for Panama. Everybody was doing their devotionals, sharing what the Spirit had spoken to them, and was preparing to leave comfort zones in order to minister. I kept getting a flickering emotion of what I thought was annoyance as something about the situation continually grabbed onto my heart. Then God dropped the phrase “mission minded” into my spirit as I prayed. I wrote it on the cover of my devotional that day, but it wasn’t until a week later when I was watching my teammates doing ministry in the schools that I understood what God had been putting on my heart. I saw that if we went into our daily lives with the mindset that we were on a mission to seek and save the lost, just like we were doing in Panama, we would be so much more effective in our society. In Panama, it did not matter that we were tired or embarrassed or that there was a language barrier or that we were not sure what we were doing half of the time. We just reached out to kids. God was urging me and challenging me to dedicate my entire life as a mission trip. I am on a mission from Heaven to this earth, and the preparation and dedication should be the same every single day despite whether I will be flying to a remote land or walking on the same ground that my feet tread daily through my town. The mission remains the same no matter where we are, and God wants us to live with hearts that are full of that knowledge.

                When I got home on August ^11th, I became very uncomfortable with the idea of being comfortable. I was struck with the sad truth when we first arrived in Panama that the people there lived every day in terrible conditions. This was their reality and their routine, not their mission trip that they could return home from. This was where and how they had to remain. While I am home trying to fill in my free time, or contemplating what to buy myself, or complaining about something insignificant, these people are living in their own unfortunate reality. When we landed in the United States again after our trip, my heart was sick. Driving down the highway away from Newark airport, I felt like I was driving back into a clouded over, soft cushioned lifestyle. Do not misunderstand me, there is nothing wrong with having a peaceful life and I am not suggesting that the United States is a utopia where no improvements can be made. Nevertheless, for me the contrast between the land that I had just left and the land that I was returning to was too striking. Suddenly, comfortable and safe did not seem like the right things to desire. I began to pray the lyrics "take me deeper than my feet could ever wander" for the sake of reaching others instead of because I was craving something for myself. I wanted to take up that mantle of being mission minded in my daily life and to be poured out,  no matter what it looked like or what it cost me.

                When I began writing this, I thought that I hadn’t learned much about myself on this trip. Yet as I type, I realize my perspective about personal growth was just misconstrued at the time that I left for Panama. I expected God to impress upon me what my personal calling was in this life, and I was disappointed when I did not have that “God moment.” I thought I “did the mission trip wrong” somehow. However, I am discovering that the greatest internal growth can occasionally come from looking outside of yourself and focusing unselfishly on what God is doing not only in you, but through you for the benefit of others. I’m realizing right now that in bearing witness to others' leaps of faith and the rewards that follow, I can glory in those rewards because we are one body. For me, Panama was a demonstration of the wrestling match between flesh and spirit. I saw first-hand how the flesh either wanted us to be self- centered or to focus on the work of the enemy, while the spirit urged us to have a servant’s heart and to focus on the accomplishments of the Lord.  This demonstration laced itself through everything that I experienced there, right down to my realization about self- growth in this very moment. 

             If you have read until this point, then I commend you! My hope is that something in my experience spoke to you and has encouraged you in your walk with Christ. After all, we're promised that by the power of the blood and the word of our testimony, we will overcome.

                Panama, my heart is with you still. Thank you for changing my life.