The Youthworks Year 13 Gospel Gap Year team is in Kenya, Africa. The team of 26 students and 3 staff left Australia on Sunday for a four week short term mission in Nairobi and regional Kenya.
One of the team members, Chris Entwistle, will be phoning in his daily travel blog to sydneyanglicans.net to keep us in the picture of the journey, both personal and corporate.
Day One
As I begin this reflective journey of my experiences and encounters in Africa, I realise how much I have come to appreciate and value the opportunity I have had to actively reflect and process my life experiences.
So often in the past I have allowed the significant experiences, encounters and epiphanies in my life to simply occur, to pass and fade into my memories without contemplating their impact upon myself and how my mistakes, successes, encouragements and challenges should guide my actions in the future.
Aside from providing me with the time and expectation to journal, Year 13 has offered me a vast array of experiences and has exposed me to an enormous amount of great teaching to stimulate my reflections.
It with this in mind that I say what a deep privilege it is to be able to journal whilst in Kenya.
My prayer is that as I experience some new, some shocking, some disturbing, some uplifting, some encouraging, some deeply challenging experiences, that God may lead me into a response that shapes my life and my actions in a way which honours him and allows me to better serve him.
With all this said and done, I think it is appropriate to remind myself of the proper place that experience should have on this mission.
Whilst the fact that travelling half way around the world to a completely foreign country is an undeniably exciting prospect, and while there will undoubtedly be a number of things I see and do that will irrevocably change my character, I believe that to place one’s focus greatly upon experience is highly selfish. To place such great value on experience in my mind places the focus on mission on your own self improvement and your own benefits, and a mentality of what ‘I can get out of this time’.
Such a focus to me seems to undermine the purpose of our mission: to be sent into a community to serve. Experience certainly has its place, and without it I would have nothing to reflect on. I think, however, we should not think of what we can receive, or gain from this mission, but what we can give.
It is with these sentiments that I depart on this physical and reflective journey to Kenya.
It is my prayer that as others read these reflections, in some way they may share in the work that God will undertake in my life and be encouraged to also go forth to serve the church either in their area, but particularly overseas.
Photo courtesy Arno & Louise Meintjes
