Mission Trip, Day 1

The Arden UMC 2015 Mission Team, minus Mission Chair, Brittany Young, who was taking the pic.

Today the girls (my girls, Anna and Mary) and I joined the rest of the Arden UMC mission team in Logan, WV. That sentence seems simple enough, but has a lot packed into it. You see, originally, I wasn’t going to be on this trip. The week (well, this week) is the last week of camp (so Chris is busy…constantly…), but late enough in the summer that teachers and school staff are returning to work, so much of my available (family) childcare is back at work. But I wanted to be here. I wanted to have this time and be part of the great work our missions folks do. So the first hurdle was decided, “Hey, let me drive 6-7 hours with my 4 ½ year old and nearly 2 year old. Sure that will be fun…and then let me try to entertain them while being somewhat present for a mission trip…”

Anna was super excited by the prospect. Mary, well, Mary heard we were going to stay at a hotel and I think she was excited about that. I figured it was better for us AND the team to not try to get my girls to sleep in a shared room with them.

Honestly, at times during my trip to Zimbabwe, when my guilt for being away from my girls for so long was the hardest, I reminded myself that I would have these days (we leave Thursday morning while the rest of the team stays till Saturday) with them. And that I would probably have my fill of Mommy-daughter time by the end of it!

Sunday afternoon and evening I suddenly got super anxious about the whole thing. HOW HAD THIS SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA? You need to know that Chris is the most sane one in our family. He keeps the rest of us calm. How was this going to work?!

But Monday morning came and we started to load up. 

Now Mary is in the final days of a round of antibiotics for an ear infection. She doesn’t get them often, but I didn’t want to risk being down here and THEN find out she was sick, so after a couple days of her saying on and off her ear hurt, we got her checked out, and well, got her antibiotic, and voila! 

Except this morning the girls were so excited that I don’t think Mary ate much. Then we gave her the meds, and she gulped down water and, well, by the Antietam battlefield she got sick and stayed unwell for a bit longer. I called Chris. I asked him what I should do, and he wisely and frustratingly listened, said both my defined options (turning back, or giving her food in case the meds upset her empty stomach) sounded reasonable…and that he was sure I would make the right decision since I was the one there with her and he wasn’t.

Anna was devastated. Honestly, if it had been just me and Mary I’d likely have turned around. But Anna and I made a deal. If Mary didn’t get better after eating something, if she got sick again, we would head home. So I gave Mary some Pepperidge Farm goldfish and we tried it. And we made it to Logan, WV, our destination, and Mary was fine.

We settled into the hotel, and I hoped the couple hours the girls had to unwind after the drive would burn some energy, but, yeah, no.

We had a good time visiting with the team, after they’d gotten back to the church they’re staying at (it’s like less than 5 minutes from our hotel) but man, trying to have a conversation with them while keeping an eye (sometimes unsuccessfully) on the girls…yeah, I felt like…you know those beer goggles they use for alcohol ed for college students? Yeah, it was like beer goggle parenting/conversing.

By the time we’d finished dinner, I knew the girls needed to head back to the hotel. Everyone needed the girls to head back to the hotel. Most of all, me!

But you know what, I think of how awesome it is that our girls are getting to “go on a mission trip” so young. I hope and pray it is the first of many, many more. My first mission trip was at my first appointment, Jefferson UMC, when we took a group of youth and adults to do Hurricane Katrina clean up. My girls? Ages 4 and 2! 

The other thing—our girls LOVE our Arden folks. It was one of the reasons they were so amped up tonight. I love that too. I love that our girls are so excited to get to spend even more time than usual with their church family.

Our team will be working this week on the trailer home of a family about an hour away from Logan who lost their roof in Hurricane Sandy. Because it was not fixed right away, the damage became extensive, and the entire interior (once the roof was fixed) had to be gutted. We are putting in drywall and painting.

As I sit here typing (in the hotel room bathroom, while the girls sleep, which is the sad lot of all parents traveling with small children in regular hotel rooms…), I’m wearing my Africa University sweatshirt, and reflecting on the chance I got to share (briefly, while also trying to make sure my girls didn’t fall down the steps) tonight about my trip to Zimbabwe, as one of our Arden folks said, “You’ll go back to Zimbabwe again, though, won’t you?” 

Yes, yes I will. I am sure of it.

And maybe someday, having started their mission experiences so early, my girls will go too.

And maybe, just maybe, whatever the Church is up to, whatever highs or lows that church polity has found, and whatever experiences my girls have with Church, they will KNOW that being part of the community of Jesus Christ means meeting new people (because they are already family), serving others (because it's what we're all called to), and doing hard things…even if the hard things mainly entail corralling small children for a few days as we try to be the hands and feet of Jesus along with our brothers and sisters in Christ.