Mission Trips

I just spent a week in air thick with humidity and hormones. We took our annual mission trip, this year to help the Jersey Shore clean up in the aftermath of Hurricane/Super Storm Sandy. It reminded me that I have meant to tell one of the great untold contemporary American stories.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of Christian young people travel to serve humanity. They gut and rebuild housing in the wake of natural disasters. They repair community centers. They run programming for impoverished children. I have personally witnessed their work among Native Americans in the southwest; and in Appalachia, Canada, New York City, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the Gulf Coast post-Katrina, Joplin post-tornado, and now New Jersey. They sleep on each others' shoulders during the endless road hours. They go without showers. They eat whatever gets put in front of them. They sleep on the ground in tents, on bunk beds in temporary modular units, on church basement floors. The older ones among them ask off work in order to go work.

They get paid not a cent. They complain not a word. They embody the love of Jesus. Those they help cannot believe their attitude and the work they accomplish. This week our young people worked at the house of John B. Sandy left a thick layer of sludge and slime in his home's crawl space. In the 48 hours following the storm he removed the floors and drywall up to waist height. Then the sheer magnitude of the job froze him. The bank told him to bulldoze the place. The insurance company refused to pay, citing the fine print that stated he had not closed on the policy enough days in advance of Sandy's arrival to activate his coverage. (There's a lot of creative timing going on in the Mid-Atlantic region.) In his own word, John was paralyzed.

Ten months later, our youth showed up. We ripped up the remaining sub-flooring. Dawn, our youth leader, sat first on one joist and then another, using a sawsall to remove shreds of OSB. I cut out the residual wiring. Young people eagerly—and I mean eagerly—jumped down into the crawl space to remove the awful, overwhelming, rotting detritus from the storm. After dozens of puncture-proof trash bags hit the curb we started installing new sub-flooring. Three youth became the Cut Team, using the sawsall to make amazingly accurate, straight cuts. Other youth—including a boy others have always thought flighty—fought for the privilege of carrying sheets of flooring to the installers. We installers almost could not keep up with the flow of wood. Jaydon, the three-year-old whose bedroom we floored, said, “WOW!!!”

This happens every year. And that's just our church's youth. Multiply that by the thousands of churches that send groups.

Sometimes I hear older people complain about today's youth. No attention spans. Absorbed in their electronics. Spoiled.

I compare what I hear with what I see. I have no concern whatsoever about the character of the generations now rising in America. Sure, as always, there are young people who fit the stereotyped complaining. But then, young people could make a few deserved criticisms of their elders.

In the end, the point is this: each year an army of young people, serving in the name of Jesus, make an impact on hundreds of thousands of people living in thousands of communities across this nation and around the world. They practice what their preachers preach. Preachers like me. And it gives me incredible encouragement.

This Good News should be shouted from the mountaintops. Maybe you could share this as a start.