When I talk about my foreign and domestic missions activities, I always try to stress that mission trips are for everyone. Nobody listens.

“I’m so glad people like you do this,” they tell me. They’re missing the point. God does not call the qualified; he qualifies the called. I have no special aptitudes or abilities which have enabled me to go into the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee, the rural countryside of El Triunfo, Nicaragua, or the Kibera slums outside Nairobi, Kenya. I get grouchy and homesick on mission trips.

But God gives me the grace to muddle through, and I find myself doing things of which I never dreamed I was capable.

Click on these links for information about the missions programs with which I’m involved:

• Mountain T.O.P. (Tennessee Outreach Project), an interdenominational (but United Methodist-affiliated) missions group which places volunteers into the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee.
• LEAMIS International Ministries, an independent, interdenominational group which organizes international missions programs and helps to train missionaries and volunteers. The photo here is of me holding a young Nicaraguan boy during my first-ever foreign short-term mission trip.