by Ryan McAdams

Like each year past, we spent hours and hours in preparation for this trip. We had many sit-down-and-talk meetings, but we also did quite a few activities as well. Each one of these prepared us for various situations we might encounter while in Argentina. Of course, taking a trip to Argentina, we had to face the omnipresence of football (the international flavor). So, in addition to acquainting ourselves with Boca and River (the two most popular football clubs in Argentina), we needed to accept the reality that we would have to humiliate ourselves on the pitch (soccer field) as well. We did spend some time practicing the beautiful game, and many members of our team did in fact improve their skills. But, we didn’t take a missions trip to play football from nine to five every day. And while we tried to work as a team on the pitch, we had to get to know each other through other methods as well. Each preparation session did have an aspect of building our intra-team relationships, but year after year, the missions garage sale seems to foster relationship-building quite well. This year’s garage sale did not deviate from the molds of the previous years, and having the relaxed-yet-unified atmosphere again helped to bond the team as we laughed with each other, but also learned to work with each other to achieve the common goal of having a successful garage sale.

Our most significant preparation, however, came as the result of our planning meetings. Sure, we had to plan various performances we would do, like the skits, songs, and body worship, and we even had to all come to the understanding that anything could change at any moment (e.g. we might not even use our skits). But, we had to keep in mind that we primarily go to Argentina to share the gospel message. And with that, we kept our focus in the planning meetings on prayer and the gospel. Keeping our focus on prayer helped us maintain our perspective on the larger picture of honoring God in whichever situation we found ourselves and helped us prepare to adapt to changes because of our trust in God. As well, the simplicity of much of our preparation helped us to keep in mind that the essence of what we would do on missions would hopefully not differ greatly from our normal church lives back home.

Once we realized we couldn’t possibly prepare for everything we might face working in Argentina, we more fully understood that we must depend on God’s provision and protection for our entire time there. Knowing our God is great, we could trust on him to use both our preparation and our time there, in spite of our inadequacies, to work for his glory.