Ensenada, Mexico
Just returned from my impromptu mission trip to Mexico.
I KNOW! I was as surprised as you are. A friend of mine from a church in the Western Suburbs called me and asked if I was free and would be interested in an all-expense paid mission trip to Ensenada, Mexico to work with orphans and the poorest of the poor for a week.
How could I refuse??
God pulled some amazing strings to get us there – and I’m so thankful for the gentleman who raised the funds so I could go (he was planning on going himself, but at the last minute got a new job! Win/win in my opinion.
Ensenada is my first “developing world” mission trip. Previously, I have done work in Argentina, Japan, and Australia. All places that are in desperate need of Jesus Christ, and yet the Baja Pennisula where I spent only 6 days broke my heart in ways the previous places never did.
As I sat in rooms with mud floors on the precipice of a mountainside just waiting for a downpour to wash away their lives…looking at babies with life-threatening diseases, at elderly with treatable wounds with no medical care, and at a literal city of children with parents who had long since abandoned them…I began hearing God’s cries for the poor to be liberated.
Simultaneously, I am reading Exodus – where God uses Moses to liberate an oppressed people and call them out as his own. I don’t claim to be an expert on Liberation Theology, but I know to my core that God’s pursuit is for the forgotten, the abused, the ragamuffins. God craves the reconciliation of all creation, but I believe it will be accomplished through those who can’t afford the coffee I’m drinking right now, and can’t imagine doing mission work half a world away. They are the down-and-outs, and that’s exactly what God became in Jesus to find them.
“I came for the sick, not the healthy…”
