Curious Reads: A Short-Term Mission Trip Goes Wrong

Also the first time I felt "fat."

Hello friends, Liz here.

In the eleventh grade, I climbed a volcano—sort of.

This is not a story about volcanic eruptions, but

My church had taken a group of its youth to El Salvador on mission, joining the movement evangelical churches sending their youth on short-term missions in the early 2000s who believed that reaching the capital N nations with the capital g gospel would probably encourage Jesus to rapture us American evangelical conservatives more quickly, thereby saving the world from the liberal left, whose agenda was to destroy us. Not to mention that mobilizing their teenagers as missionaries exonerated their parents from pursuing the great commission outside of the cozy suburbs. Regardless, my relatives who donated to my trip abroad could be assured that we would erect a poorly constructed building for our impoverished, third-world neighbors, which surely meant a positive balance in our heavenly bank accounts, right?

However, I had my own reasons for joining a mission trip to El Salvador. I had already been on two trips to Mexico with my youth group, each time collecting donations from family and friends for my life-changing vacation, each time hoping that I’d receive a mystical call to the missions field while overseas, like one of my heroes, Elisabeth Elliot, had, or maybe that I’d meet my missionary husband while abroad. But for some reason, I could never clearly hear God’s voice amidst the flirting and card games and rowdy worship songs with hand motions.

So when pastor Dave announced the mission trip to El Salvador, it sounded exotic, intense, and perhaps a  more promising way to hear the elusive Call of God, and perhaps even meet the man of God’s dreams.