The first three weeks at Kaleo Portland have made it clear that God has amazing plans for this summer. Each team that comes through has encountered so much while serving the city of Portland. We’ve been able to serve the homeless populations downtown and seen so many of the members of our teams push themselves to love on people in ways they had never before considered possible or probable. So many of the teens that travel to Portland to do “mission work” have a basic concept of what that involves and they do come to the city with the intent to show the love of Christ to people. But they end up having that same love revealed to them in so many ways as well.

Last week, while two students sat down to share lunch and a bit of conversation with an older couple who live on the streets of downtown Portland, they met a woman who desperately needed someone to hear about her life. She had grown up in many different foster homes that used her as a live-in servant and abused her physically. However awful her life began, she had come to know God over the years and was still pursuing a life of mission—she felt called to be a youth pastor and wanted to share her story with a couple of young Christians, pastoring them and inspiring them for the short time we shared together. Although we had set out that day to bless others and provide them with a meal and some company, we were the ones served by an admirably strong woman who blessed us with her story and her insights into living and striving to be more like Christ. She welcomed us into her home by learning each of our names and laying out cardboard for us to sit on so we didn’t have to sit on the ground, and barely touched the lunch we had packed for her because she had so much to say to us.

A common understanding about mission trips is that you receive so much more than you give, through thankful smiles, hugs from kids, and other forms of reciprocal love. But God’s plan for our lunch that day was for us to be the ones primarily served and blessed. Even though our group had the financial and physical resources to serve Portland, our social and economic standing in society did not make us any more well equipped to serve others than the new friend we made who had been living under the bridge where we met her. I walked up to her with the arrogant assumption that we were given the power and the duty to bless and serve her simply because of our ability to physically provide lunch for her, but I was most definitely mistaken. Even though each of us is born into different situations and has a life controlled by our circumstances, we are still given opportunities to serve others in all kinds of situations. God has called us to love the world, not only when we spend a week or a month or a year in intentional service, but from wherever we are, in every conversation and interaction.