By: Eliana Morales
Late at night on March 23, I landed in Atlanta after traveling since 4 a.m. I had just come back from my first mission trip to Mexico with the Evangelistic Resource Center (ERC) along with 21 others.
Prior to last week, I couldn’t picture myself as a missionary even though I had signed up for the trip last semester. My fundraising was completed by January, but the trip still didn’t seem real. No one knew my motivation for registering was that I would receive a level two service-learning credit, which I needed in order to graduate.
During ERC Bootcamp, the three-day event meant to prepare us for the trip, I felt like I was masquerading among people who truly felt “called” to be there. I began to reconsider my opinions about mission work.
I always thought student missionaries mainly used mission trips as a means of self-improvement. After all, wasn’t the selling point that I’d come back renewed and transformed after painting a school or preaching a sermon?
I found it incredibly insensitive how people posted pictures with poor children, knowing they would return to their soft, air-conditioned life soon after. Why can’t they just preach to those in their neighborhood instead of traveling around the world?
While at bootcamp, the pastor said evangelism is more for us than for those we go to. I couldn’t believe that he had just admitted mission trips are more for our benefit.
But later, I thought deeply about what he was saying. He wasn’t telling us that mission work doesn’t benefit those whom we go to, but we are often blessed as well. The pastor also provided biblical texts that support preaching abroad.
Matthew 28:19-20 is called the Great Commission: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”
I told myself that there’s nothing wrong with going abroad to preach. But I still wasn’t fully convinced. I knew this trip would change me in some way, but I wasn’t sure how.
Now, after ten days in Chiapas, I feel transformed. Now I know that people don’t post pictures to look superior, but because they actually connected with the people.
I know that I was not confident in preaching, but God gave me the words. A member told me the message I preached gave him hope when he was about to give up.
I learned that traveling to another country to preach is about reaching people we otherwise wouldn’t have met. It’s about learning to appreciate a different culture. I ate every night with a different church member and had home-cooked meals while getting to know the most wonderful people.
But the trip wasn’t without trials. The projector broke before I even got to the pulpit. I didn’t have amazing testimonies for many days, and attendance was sometimes lower than the previous night. I stumbled and stuttered or forgot to change the slides.
Yet, when I appealed for baptism on Thursday, three out of the four visitors decided to get baptized. After that sermon, my confidence grew. I became eloquent.
In Exodus 4:10, Moses says, “O Lord, I have never been eloquent… I am slow of speech and tongue.” God then says, “Who gave human beings their mouths? … Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.”
Although I feel sad about leaving the people I met behind, I have hope. The last sermon was about how we will be reunited someday.
1 Thessalonians 4:17: “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.”
I left Villahermosa with that message of hope—we will see each other again.
After returning, I can confidently say this trip has been my favorite part of the semester. When things went wrong or I felt scared, I had no option but to rely on God, and He always pulled through for me. I grew spiritually, watching people be moved by my words even when I didn’t believe in myself. There were long nights and stressful sermon practices.
But in just ten days, I feel as if I’ve been made new. I didn’t go on this trip to be transformed, but it happened anyway. My previous opinions of missions were shattered in just ten days.
Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
