For the past seven years, I have been going on summer mission trips with my youth group. Every year I raise all the money for my trip as they have gotten rather expensive. Many of my sponsors have been supporting me on every trip I've been on, or at least the last two or three, and whenever I return home from one of my trips I sit down and write a letter of thanks to them telling them what lessons their contributions have allowed me the opportunity to learn abroad. Just keeping up with these relationships alone has taught me a great deal about myself and about people in general, and forces me, each summer, to assess my own personal growth and document it in these letters.
My most recent adventure was to the lush mountains of Jamaica. There, in an impoverished ghost town, God taught me perseverance and patience through a little girl and gratefulness and humility through a mural.
One day I had the amazing opportunity to help a young girl about the age of 9 to improve her reading skills. I was reading Jane Eyre for school before dinner, when she came up to me and asked what I was doing. I showed her the book and explained it was for school and asked if she was learning to read in school. She nodded but shyly said that she was not very good at it. I then asked her if she wanted to read with me and she agreed. For the next 45 minutes, we read one page of Jane Eyre sounding out each syllable one at a time. She was amazingly patient and perseverant, and when asked if she wanted to stop, she kept saying no! Encouraged by her persistence and invigorated by her desire to learn I was in turn given patience and desire to help. While a tedious task, I found so much joy in watching her start to catch on and recognize some words as they reappeared on the page over and over. I felt badly for the girl that she had to struggle through such a difficult book at such a tender age of 9, but at the same time I was so proud of her that she persisted.
