01 August 2005 Devotion for Today "Mission Trip to West Virginia" Philippians 4:13

01 August 2005  Devotion for Today  “Mission Trip to West Virginia”  Philippians 4:13

 

            I’ve been gone for a while-that’s because I’ve been away on a mission trip to West Virginia for the past week and a half.  Part of that week was preparing for the trip and the rest on the trip itself.  My wife and I took eight teens out of our comfort zone and into a place where God could help us to make a difference.  With the help of an organization called Youth on Mission, we served at a small mountain church called West View Baptist Chapel near the community of Hillsboro where we helped on small construction projects on and around the church building.  We shoveled gravel, hung guttering, cut brush and trimmed trees; hung skirting and underpinning on the building and even built a small tool shed.  It was amazing watching these youth apply their skills and their heart for Jesus throughout the week.  God was good to us as He challenged us when we gave of our limited skill and experience and transformed it into a statement to the community that the West View Chapel was going to continue as a viable ministry there.   The value of such experiences not only allows us to bless other people who need our ministry, but we also become better Christians as a result of the experience of faith providing the opportunity to grow in His grace and to apply His power.  

            The overall theme for the week was: “Its not about You.”  The implication of course was that it was about Jesus and sharing Him with others.  We were to leave the comforts of our conveniences the expectations of what we wanted to get out of this mission trip behind us.  Indeed some of the things which we encountered were fraught with frustration and difficulty.  There was the temptation to focus on the negative instead of what Christ was doing.  The theme helped to overcome the me-oriented mindset that often pervades the majority of our lives and reduced us to relying upon what the Lord wanted done.

            I fully realize that our experience of faith did not reap results of apostolic proportions, but some of the same elements were similar to what the apostles experienced on their missionary journeys: going somewhere they had never gone before; experiencing the opposition of Satan; confronting their fears with the power of God and returning in the triumph of what God can do.  The irreducible core, the boiled-down bottom line of the experience of eight active teenagers and two middle-age chaperones is the truth found in Philippians 4:13 “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”  Hopefully, when we return to the business of living, we will begin to see that all of life around us is as much a mission trip as the excursion to West Virginia was.  May God work His grace in us to allow this to happen also.

            Have a blessed day!

 

Rev. Jeffery C. Russell
Salem Baptist Church
Elizabeth City, NC
jefferyrussell@earthlink.net

 

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