It's Ghana be Great: The End.

After lots of thank yous, goodbyes, hugs, and Ghanaian handshakes on Saturday morning, the last of the Ghana Gold 2009 team walked into the terminal in Accra. We passed smoothly through the airport, onto our flight, across the ocean, into JFK, and to our final destinations. For Sharina and I, that meant flying to Cincinnati, where I helped her find a suitable place in the airport to camp out until her connecting flight to Kansas. Carri picked me up at the airport and took me home, and I was pretty ready to curl up in my own comfy bed after that. It was a great month, but I was definitely energetically drained.

I've been thinking about the most impactful things that happened on this trip and, like any good boy raised in the Baptist church, I believe there are three. The first was sharing the gospel with people in Swedru. This gave me a renewed passion to see people go after Jesus and a desire to be alongside them during this process. In Sonshine, the backyard Bible clubs our youth group put on for neighborhood kids, Mrs. Wolf always used to say that the eyes are the mirror to the soul. As I watched people listen to the message of the Bible for the first time in Swedru, I saw people coming to serious realizations of their desire to have a personal relationship with God and it was evident in their eyes. But, especially with the children, I often thought, "Who is going to go with them now and help them to grow in their faith and answer their questions when things don't make sense and comfort them in the hard times and rejoice with them in victories and just share life with them?" If I'm following Christ, I'm called to do those things. But I don't have to go across the ocean to do it; there are people on my block that need that.

The second experience, a longitudinal one, that had a big impact on me was in the area of friendship. The eleven people that joined me on the Ghana trip quickly turned into great friends (some of us already were and grew even closer). The personalities, ages, and backgrounds differed quite a bit, but our common mission and passion bound us together tightly and God did great things among and through our team. There are conversations from that trip that I will remember for a long time and that have left a mark on me, a result of all of us allowing God to use us in each other's lives and a willingness to be vulnerable with one another. So Matt, Tom, Briana, Dan, Michael, Brenna, Dayna, Sharina, Mike, Dahlia, and James... thank you.

The third experience was meeting the serving attitude of the Ghanaians face to face, which was also longitudinal. Rich and Gina lived this out every day with Matt and I, doing anything they could to make us comfortable and ensure that we had a nice stay. I know the other host families did the same. But we saw it everywhere in little things. They made sure that we all had bottled water on hand for our health. They gave us their shower shoes to use. They hung our laundry out to dry. They carried water buckets from the well to the house so we could bathe. And they don't do it to be recognized or to pre-purchase a favor from you later. They do it because it's kind and it's the right thing to do. It's our duty to one another as fellow human beings. Matt talked about this in the devotional we led from Luke 17. You don't get any special commendation for doing the right thing when it's a given that you should always be doing that anyway. It's a duty. Given that, it has definitely challenged me to have a better attitude and increased readiness to go out and just serve people.

If you've been reading the blog regularly, you know that God definitely accomplished a lot through our team this month. The three things I've just mentioned are the biggies for me, but really there are many, many more things that I could have talked about that also had an impact on me. If you'd like to stop and talk to me sometime, I would be thrilled to tell you more about the trip, give you more specifics, and share some pictures. For now, I just want to thank you for reading the blog, praying for me, and/or financially supporting my trip. It was a great month. I'll leave you with a small appetite-wetting sampling of pictures here...

Swedru