I’m gonna go when the Spirit says go…

I loved seeing Chelsea (a young wife/mother from our church) post on Facebook that she is willing to make cakes for people to raise some needed cash so she and her husband Ryan can go on a mission trip to New Orleans in October with a dozen other people from her church.  This is a picture of a cake Chelsea just made.  I know they are trying to sell their house and that finances are probably tight, as they are for many of us.   It would have been very easy for Chelsea and Ryan to say, “We’d love to go on the mission trip, but we just can’t afford it right now.”   And truth be known, there is so much damage still in New Orleans, which will be recovering for years and years to come from the damage done by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, that in the long run the impact Ryan and Chelsea will have on the city of New Orleans will be minimal.  Right now, Chelsea’s saying, “Wait a second, why are we going then?”

Here’s a little secret about mission trips:  Often they are not about changing the place you’re going as much as they are about changing you who go.  Will Ryan and Chelsea’s presence encourage the homeowner of the home they’re working on (and the neighbors!)?  Of course it will.  Will their efforts move the home closer to completion?  Sure.  But make no mistake, giving up vacation time to go to a place so much different than where you live, to give your blood, sweat, and tears for people you don’t know, and risk ending up in the hospital (as one of our brothers on our team did last year)… make no mistake, it changes you.  New Orleans will change Ryan and Chelsea more than they will change New Orleans.  It moves you to listen to the stories of the people there.  It moves you to see the acres of foundations where houses used to be.  It moves you to see the marks on the houses signifying where they found people who died in the flood.  And it pleases Jesus.  And if you will agree to go, Jesus will make the way and bless you for going.  God gave Chelsea a “creative” way to make it happen.  I pray that people respond to help her “Cakes for a Cause” mission.

Going is what Jesus tells us to do.  He says to Go.  Just Go.  And as David Platt says in his book Radical, “The point is not where we go, how we get there, or even how long we stay.  The point is simply that we go.”