I got home from Bogotá exhausted. And not the kind of tired that a good night’s sleep fixes. The kind that settles into your bones after a week of long days, constant activity, and carrying more emotions than you expected. And as anyone who has been on a short-term mission trip knows, it’s almost impossible to explain what those weeks are really like.
And look, I’m aware of some of the criticisms of short-term missions: Some trips can encourage a “white savior” mentality. Some have little lasting impact. Some even create extra work for the local people they’re supposed to help. Those can all be true and deserve to be taken seriously. But they’re not true every time.
Our team spent the week with children from middle-class families to children living in desperate poverty, from older adults who had been largely forgotten to children in the hospital whose families had little support, or in some cases, had abandoned them.
Did our one-week visit solve any of those problems? No. No one escaped poverty because we came, no hospital suddenly had more resources, and no life was magically transformed because a group of Americans with faltering Spanish showed up for a few days.
But when you sit across from people who are hurting, you lose the ability to pretend suffering is someone else’s problem. Faces replace statistics and grand sweeping narratives become personal. Their experience becomes embedded in our minds and hearts. We’re no longer the same because of the knowledge and experiences we gain.
So what do we do with that change? Maybe it changes how we advocate for the poor around us here. Maybe we go back to where we served and our impact is multiplied because we return. Maybe we leave with a greater burden on our hearts that allows us to love and feel and serve more like Jesus would for those that the world so easily overlooks.
Hopefully, we ourselves leave changed and a little more like Jesus.
And the change isn’t one-sided. We hope and pray that our presence encouraged the local pastors, teachers, and caregivers who continue serving long after our plane left Colombia. If our visit reminded them that they aren’t laboring alone, then that matters too.
And we may not have lifted anyone out of poverty or fixed anyone’s health problems. But because of the connections that were built, we wanted desperately to let these children (and others) know that they are valuable to God. They matter more than they can even dream. I wanted to communicate that to each child so badly that my chest hurt.
Some of these situations are so torn, so desperate, that it is easy for these children to go through life believing that they don’t matter, that they aren’t seen by a loving God, and that they’re eternally bound to live in suffering. We want them to know that they are seen, they are loved, and they are children of God.
They are worth traveling 2,500 miles to see for just a few days because they matter that much to someone – even someone they have not met before. When life has taught you that you’re invisible, being seen matters. When you’ve wondered if anyone cares, having someone sit with you, laugh with you, pray with you, and remember your name matters.
Love doesn’t solve every problem, but love isn’t nothing either.
A short-term mission trip isn’t measured only by how many problems it “fixes”. Sometimes it’s measured by the hearts it softens, the relationships it begins, and the reminder, to everyone involved, that every person bears the image of God and is worthy of self-sacrificial love.
If you’ve never gone on a mission trip, I’d encourage you to consider it. You won’t save the world. But you might bring the Kingdom of God here on earth like it is in Heaven just a little bit more.
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