Why do you want to give up your comfortable American lifestyle to minister to the poor and hurting overseas? Why did you give up a chance to go to college and a have a good career and instead only own what can be put into two suitcases? Why go to places where you can get sick or contract an incurable disease or be kidnapped or killed? Why do you do it?
Every time I am asked these questions I think back to my first mission trip. I was twenty-years-old when my father and younger sister Beverly visited Colombia for the first time in 2009. Our family was in a dark place and I was dead inside. My father was a pastor and we had started two churches in our living room so to the outside world we looked like the prefect family. We worshipped God every Sunday and served our church members throughout the week but when everyone left it was like a cloud of past pain and hatred of those who hurt us settled into our house. I will never forget the fact that we could no longer talk or have fun as a family because we were haunted by our pain. So I wanted out anyway I could find. I needed something to live for.
So when they came back from that mission trip full of passion and a renewed love for God, I knew I had to go and see what they had found. For three months I asked my dad when I could go with him to Colombia and the day he called me into his office to let me know we were going, I remember running and jumping into his arms because I knew I HAD to go… I couldn’t stay who I was…
God always answers our heart’s desires! Most of the time we don’t even know what we are looking for or what we need but the most amazing thing is God gives us exactly what we need even when we don’t know what to ask for.
I knew I needed something but I didn’t know what was missing. But when I walked into the orphanage that my dad had visited three months earlier, I found it. I didn’t know I was missing the heart of God… but I was… I had grown up in the church and worked in the ministry most of my life but I had somehow missed the heart of God and it left a gaping hole in my heart. I could never understand why I wasn’t passionate for God or why Christianity seemed like a chore to me. But when I looked into the eyes of those love-starved children, looking for someone, anyone to show them the love of their Daddy God, I finally understood that I had missed a relationship with Jesus. I needed to know Christ and I didn’t. I had head knowledge but I didn’t know Jesus because I hadn’t experienced His presence and I didn’t know His heart or what He was passionate about.
My fist trip changed my life because it set me on a mission to know the heart of God and through knowing Christ I was finally healed from my past. He loved away all of my pain and that’s why now, nothing this world could offer would tempt me to not give God my all, because He gave me His all. Why do what I do? Because I can’t not. I love Jesus too much to not give all I have! His love makes it worth it! I follow the heart of God no matter where it takes me. Because as my dad says, “I have a holy addiction to His love!” And a big part of God’s heart is for the poor and fatherless! Psalms 68:5, “Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in His holy habitation.”
So when they came back from that mission trip full of passion and a renewed love for God, I knew I had to go and see what they had found. For three months I asked my dad when I could go with him to Colombia and the day he called me into his office to let me know we were going, I remember running and jumping into his arms because I knew I HAD to go… I couldn’t stay who I was… 
I knew I needed something but I didn’t know what was missing. But when I walked into the orphanage that my dad had visited three months earlier, I found it. I didn’t know I was missing the heart of God… but I was… I had grown up in the church and worked in the ministry most of my life but I had somehow missed the heart of God and it left a gaping hole in my heart. I could never understand why I wasn’t passionate for God or why Christianity seemed like a chore to me. But when I looked into the eyes of those love-starved children, looking for someone, anyone to show them the love of their Daddy God, I finally understood that I had missed a relationship with Jesus. I needed to know Christ and I didn’t. I had head knowledge but I didn’t know Jesus because I hadn’t experienced His presence and I didn’t know His heart or what He was passionate about.