SENT DAY 2 Mission Trip Journal

SENT DAY 2 Mission Trip Journal

Today was our first full work day, and these kids showed up.

We spent the morning weeding an entire playground area, on our knees in the dirt for hours. Then we headed to one of the residences on the camp property and built a rock bed around the landscaping. That meant hauling wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of river rock and spreading it by hand until our backs and shoulders felt it. It was hot, it was heavy, and it was one of those jobs where you don’t see how much you’ve done until you stand back and look.

For the most part, nobody complained. When someone started dragging a little, somebody else would jump in and pick up the slack, crack a joke, or just start working harder next to them until the tired one caught a second wind. When we finally did stand back, that playground was clean and that rock bed looked awesome.

But the work wasn’t the part of today I can’t stop thinking about.

Tonight in our devo, we opened up Psalm 139. I asked the students to just sit with it for a minute. God knows when we sit down and when we get up. He knows our thoughts before we even think them. He knows the words on our tongue before we say them out loud. There is nowhere we can go, nothing we can hide, no version of ourselves we can keep in the dark, because He is already there. Every thought. Every action. Every regret. Every failure we’ve buried so deep we thought no one would ever find it. He sees all of it. He’s always seen all of it.

And knowing all of that about us, He still wants us. Not the cleaned-up version. Not the version we perform for other people. All of it, laid bare, and He still moved toward us. That’s the whole reason Jesus came. John 3:17 says He didn’t come into the world to condemn it, He came to save it. He didn’t come to catalog our failures. He came to carry them.

So tonight we asked the students something hard. We asked them to think about the one thing. The thing nobody else knows about. The thing that keeps them up at night, or the thing they’re still carrying shame over, or the thing they’ve been quietly wrestling with and hiding from everyone around them. And then we told them the truth. Whatever that thing is, Jesus already took care of it at the cross. It’s finished. It’s paid for.

The real question isn’t whether Jesus did enough. He did. The real question is whether we actually believe it.