I’m on my way to Mexico today. It’s the first trip of many, Lord willing.
When I was a child, way back in the 1900s, 1996 specifically, my parents took me and my brother on our first mission trip to Mexico. We loved it. We kept wanting to go back. I’ve never been to a resort in Mexico. I’ve only seen the cardboard houses, dirt floors, and cinder block buildings three stories tall.
Between 1996 and 2004, we went to Mexico nine times. The sole purpose was to give Christmas presents to as many children as possible.
The figures were given at the beginning of the day, how many bags of presents we would need to make, whether it was 300 boy presents and 500 girl presents, or vice versa. They were separated by age from toddler to teenager. Their age determined the type of present. We would spend all day putting Hot Wheels, candy, and other trinkets like yo-yos into bags, and after we filled them up, we’d put them into the big black several-gallon trash bags and load them in the vans.
We drive through rotten sewage flowing in the streets and potholes the size of the Mariana Trench and finally arrive at a church comprised of a few pieces of sheet metal and wooden poles held together with rusty nails. Sometimes, the church would be built with the Mexican builder’s material of choice, the cinder block.
There would be so many people at this church that we would have to creep up to the church at half a mile an hour so we didn’t run over anybody.
Most of the time, the Americans couldn’t get inside the church. If we did, we were flat against a wall.
At the end of the church service, we would get the bags of toys and hand each child in attendance a present.
I can’t explain the joy that floods your heart when you give a child wearing torn and tattered clothes, who lives in a cardboard house with dirt floors and lives beside a lake filled with garbage, a present for Christmas.
I know it isn’t Christmas yet, but if you want to celebrate a little early and get filled to the brim with joy and the Christmas spirit, make a basket full of items and give it to someone in need.
Truthfully, you may not be able to contain the joy and peace that floods your soul.
to anyone with a heart two sizes too small,
– Caleb
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