Why bother spending so much time and money on a mission trip?!
You will be exhausted and may get sick too. Knowingly, thousands of people go on mission trips every year anyway. Faith makes people do extreme things. Sometimes those extreme things help people become extraordinary men and women of God.
James Chapter 2
14 What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?
15 If a brother or sister has nothing to wear and has no food for the day, 16 and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,” but you do not give them the necessities of the body, what good is it?
17 So also faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead.
18 Indeed someone may say, “You have faith and I have works.” Demonstrate your faith to me without works, and I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works.
26 For just as a body without a spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.
Join us. Let us journey together. Mother Teresa started something very beautiful in Calcutta. You have to witness the fruits of her love for the poor, to experience the depths of your own capacity to love others.
A Once in a Lifetime Opportunity
To do Corporal Works of Mercy, we don’t have to travel across the world. We can find the poor easily in our own neighborhoods. But do we do that? Do we actively seek the hungry, sick, lonely and suffering to spend time with? We don’t!
Which is why Pope Benedict XVI encourages us to leave the comfort zone, go out of the way and encounter something very foreign.
“To go on pilgrimage is not simply to visit a place to admire its treasures of nature, art or history. To go on pilgrimage really means to step out of ourselves in order to encounter God where He has revealed Himself.”
Apply Today
When we serve the poorest of the poor like Mother Teresa did, we will also encounter Jesus like she did. The kind of poverty that is in the slums of Calcutta, is something that you haven’t seen before. Every wasted opportunity could lead them into more sickness, suffering and loneliness. Which is why Mother Teresa said,
“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.”