“Home for now”

We arrived home Sunday evening from Lifest 2005. The girls were all picked up by their parents; the borrowed ten-passenger van was picked up also. I cleaned my sister’s camper the next day and she came and picked it up.

Somewhere along the line, with all the unpacking and cleaning, Val pulled out a pamphlet.

“I got this at a booth that was selling baked potatoes,” she said. “They are taking a mission trip to Africa next summer and I think I want to go.”

I told her to just hang on for a second. I grabbed my backpack and pulled out the same brochure.

“See,” she said. “It’s meant to be.”

She had been on a mission trip to Mexico earlier that summer with her church’s youth group. She had traveled with a lot of the same kids we had taken to Lifest. It had been a good experience for her, but staying in a hotel on the beach wasn’t exactly the idea of going on a mission trip that I had. They worked with a lot of disadvantaged kids, though, helping out a local church and a local soup kitchen.

I knew that when she came home she wanted to some day take another such trip. We talked a while about the trip to Kenya. She went on line and researched it some more. I have to admit, I probably looked into it as much as she did, reading everything I could find on the internet about past mission trips that Life Promotions had been on.

She beat me to it though, when she e-mailed Jen Bell, the woman in charge of the upcoming trip to Kenya. Before I knew it, Val had her application filled out and was just waiting for my signature.

“Mom, I think you really should come with too.”

I don’t remember how she got it in her head that this is something that I even remotely wanted to do. Deep down, I guess I have always wanted to travel to a third-world country as a volunteer. But as I already told the guy in the baked potato booth, I was too old.