marklindberg - Expectations On a Mission Trip

The first thing to get rid of on a mission trip is expectations. Hopefully, pride leaves right behind it. If you have an expectation of what should happen, you will probably miss what God is doing while you wallow in your disappointment. How's that for a picture?

I went to High Island, Texas last week with the expectation that I was going to lead a regular mission trip. You know, some door to door, sports evangelism, prayer walking, construction, praise and worship, and maybe some sort of VBS. I was also going to make sure that the teams I was meeting left th

eir expectations at home. In that light, I was excited to meet the two groups that were coming on the trip: Travis Shannon and his youth group from Gillette, Wyoming, and Scott and Dana Mares and their four kids from Virginia. Eric Jones was going to assist me as AIM staff. We had talked on the phone a few times and I was looking forward to working with him.

However, the first thing I had to do was lose MY expectations. Because so many people had lost their homes in the area, there wasn't going to be any door to door witnessing because there weren't that many doors. Ditto for sports evangelism. We could have prayer walked in High Island, but the communities closer to the ocean didn't even have roads in most places; scratch prayer walking. Then, the worship leader, my buddy Arnie Borowsky, got sick and had to miss the entire mission trip. The only thing left was construction. Thankfully, Marty Broddie, the pastor of St. Matthew's United Methodist Church where we were staying, gave me Shawn Hall's name.

Shawn is in charge of the Galveston section of Nehemiah's Vision, a ministry under the Southern Baptist Convention that rebuilds homes. He needed help finishing the home of a man who had been injured in an elevator accident and broke five vertebrae. We were going to frame and drywall the bottom floor and do as much touch up and repair on the second/main floor as we could. Shawn also asked if we would be willing to help clean a graveyard. It is a national historical site and the use of heavy equipment is prohibited. I told him to count on us for the house and that I would ask the group leaders about cleaning the graveyard.

So, with Shawn's help, we were able to plan work/ministry for the week. But we still had a big problem. Worship.