Panama City, Panama

Panama was as colorful and exciting as the graffiti wall backdrop to our teams drama at a local Panamanian Middle School. This mission trip is not your typical mission experience.

Our team partnered with missionaries, Gerritt and Tara Keyon as they and their team ministers to the emerging youth of Panama City. Our time mostly focused on school assemblies like the image above and their largest outreach the annual ILUMINA Conference.

Global Passion team members in the blue t-shirts are holding up sign with redeemed words. Words like Insergu@ are changed to Segur@ or in English Insecure to Secure.

The dramas were great, but what came after them was even better. Our native speaker would invite our team to begin to pray for every student. In this time we moved among the mass of students and prayed for each person. 

During one of our assemblies, I was praying and came to a young girl who I left the spirit telling me stay and pray more. The thing is I do not know how to pray in Spanish because I do not know how to speak Spanish. However, that is okay, because God heard my prayer. He knows her heart, how to communicate to her better than I ever could, and it's Him who loves her best. She began to cry and so did I as I continued to pray over her.
When it was all done she gave me a big hug and I knew God had meet this young girl.

Moments like this are why I continue to go back and whole heartedly believe every person should experience a missions trip. 

Last week I had a couple conversations about missions trip, are they more good or more harmful? What's the real point? Why so much money?

I am be far not the person with all the answers, but from my mission experience and what God has taught me about missions, it is absolutely necessary. We are called to love people and there should be no exception or price limits to that.

If you are wondering if you should go, my response is, "yes you should!" Pray about the how, where, and when. Then listen for the answers.