Simple (Complicated) Answers

"Should I get a car or go to Haiti?"

One of the seventh graders has my phone curled in his hand as we wait for parents to pick them up from a middle school event, fingers still scrolling through the unedited mass of photos and videos that the kids in Fond Cheval added over the past eleven days, examining the miniature kung fu movie and selfies squinting into too bright sun.

I've been home for eight and a half hours, and the answer comes easily to my lips.

"Go to Haiti."

Wait until that arbitrary but magical summer after freshman year, and then go to Haiti.

Let the car wait for another year when you will be old enough to actually drive it. Let the "things" sit until they become less important than the people. Let your horizons open up before you've absorbed enough cynicism to close them.

Let me plant this seed now, while you're still young enough to think that I know everything.

Because, if there are two things woven deeply into the DNA of our church, two things that the youth groups pick up on, it is this: children's ministry and missions.

The high schoolers sit around on darkened roof tops, watching for shooting stars and asking each other questions. "If you could do long term missions anywhere but here [Haiti], where would you go and what would you do?"

Medical missions, teaching, annual trips. They all have a plan, a concept, a dream. A sense that life in suburban America is not the end all be all of Christianity, that the best job that brains and charisma could earn them aren't really the highest goal.

And, I am reminded of this conversation with kids who will, next year, be old enough to join us. Reminded of the answers that we heard at winter retreat to the question, "If you knew you could not fail..." Reminded of seventeen year olds who will wait for as many silent hours as it takes to get a new passport and get on that plane.

Of a 4.0 GPA football player who drives an old, beat up, barely working car, but spends months raising the funds to go to Haiti.

Because I just spent eleven days with the answer to Al*xz's question.

I've sat with them while they wrestled through ideas of financial accountability. "If just one of us hadn't come, what could HCM have done with that money?" Listened as they began to scheme up fundraisers and better ways of doing things. Heard the gears in their brains turning a hundred miles an hour.

But, I have never once heard them say that it wasn't worth it.

Hurt, tired, sick, frustrated, giddy, numb, happy, or deliriously excited. Coming around that final corner in the airport means coming home.

It means that their friends and their family are waiting for them, and it doesn't matter how sweaty or cramped or uncomfortable the journey is to get there. It doesn't matter that they will spend the next eleven months missing these smells and these sensations and these faces.

Because, they are home.

And, family is so much more important than a car.