All the time folks ask me the value of going on a short term mission. Why should you spend so much money for such a short time ? You are going on a vacation. You could use that money and give it to the missionaries over there, and they can put it to better use. Believe me going to Guatemala is not a vacation. You are encouraging your Brothers and Sisters in the Lord, and vice versa. You are not the same person when you return back home. The Lord works in your life in a most unbelievable way that a price tag could never do. I can only speak for myself. I won a trip as a teenager shortly after I became a Christian. Our church was raising money to build a church in Cuba. The project was to sell cement blocks for fourteen cents each. The person that sold the most blocks would be given a roundtrip ticket to Cuba, and stay with a missionary family for two weeks. The other young people in the group went from church member to church member, and their folks to sell blocks. My parents were not Christians at the time. I went from house to house all up and down the streets in our neighborhood. I sold enough blocks to build a couple of churches so I won the trip to Cuba. It was a wonderful enlightening eye opener experience to go from village to village in the back of the truck playing our musical instruments, singing and giving our testimony of the love of Jesus in our life to the folks in the village as they gathered around the truck. Missions became a very important part of my life then, and the enthusiasm never left me. My husband, Bill, and I along with our two sons went to Zambia for nine years. The first month I was there I started teaching the Gospel of John and I taught every Sunday for nine years, and did not finish the Gospel of John. Students from my class in Chingola, Zambia are graduating within the next two years from Fuller Seminary, Multnomah, Biola University, and a Bible School in Kirkland. Short term missions all began back in my teen years, and I have been very involved with missionaries from around the world till this day. Now I am asking you was a short term mission worth the money ? Was the money used to help people in many countries ? Do you still consider it a vacation for the ones that are going ? Do you feel that God can and will work in the lives of the folks that go on these short mission trips ? I challenge you to pray for every short mission trip that HE will work in a very special way in the lives of the people that go, and when they return they will be used of God in even a greater way for HIS glory. My prayer is always, “LORD USE ME FOR YOUR GLORY.” The mission for everyone of us should be and is TO KNOW CHRIST AND TO MAKE HIM KNOWN. In HIM, Joan S. Hust Quotes to Inspire YOU to think about MISSIONS and consider going on a mission trip Not called! did you say? Not heard the call, I think you should say. Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear Him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help. Go stand by the gates of hell, and hear the damned entreat you to go to their father''s house and bid their brothers and sisters, and servants and masters not to come there. And then look Christ in the face, whose mercy you have professed to obey, and tell Him whether you will join heart and soul and body and circumstances in the march to publish His mercy to the world. -William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army It is not in our choice to spread the gospel or not. It is our death if we do not. -Peter Taylor Forsyth, Herald of Holiness, March 1975 If God''s love is for anybody anywhere, it''s for everybody everywhere. -Edward Lawlor God had only one Son and he made that Son a missionary. -David Livingstone Never pity missionaries. Envy them. They are where the real action is, where life and death, sin and grace, Heaven and Hell converge. -Robert C. Shannon, Christian Standard, January 1983 The supreme task of the church is the evangelization of the world. No one has the right to hear the gospel twice until everyone has had an opportunity to hear it at least once. -J. Oswald Smith, Vital Christianity, June 1979 Some are trapped in boxes of pea-sized Christianity, full of myths about missions that rob them of incentive to care about the unreached. -David Bryant, In the Gap Go, send, or disobey. -John Piper You can give without loving. But you cannot love without giving. -Amy Carmichael, missionary to India Only as the church fulfills her missionary obligation does she justify her existence. -Unknown As long as there are millions destitute of the Word of God and knowledge of Jesus Christ, it will be impossible for me to devote time and energy to those who have both. -J. L. Ewen The command has been to ''go,'' but we have stayed -- in body, gifts, prayer and influence. He has asked us to be witnesses unto the uttermost parts of the earth ... but 99% of Christians have kept puttering around in the homeland. -Robert Savage, Latin American Mission -People who do not know the Lord ask why in the world we waste our lives as missionaries. They forget that they too are expending their lives ... and when the bubble has burst, they will have nothing of eternal significance to show for the years they have wasted. Nate Saint, missionary martyr Believers who have the gospel keep mumbling it over and over to themselves. Meanwhile, millions who have never heard it once fall into the flames of eternal hell without ever hearing the salvation story. -K.P. Yohannan, founder of Gospel for Asia Bible Society Tell the students to give up their small ambitions and come eastward to preach the gospel of Christ. -Francis Xavier, missionary to India, the Philippines, and Japan The mark of a great church is not its seating capacity, but its sending capacity. -Mike Stachura The true greatness of any church in not how many it seats but how many it sends! -Unknown People who don''t believe in missions have not read the New Testament. Right from the beginning Jesus said the field is the world. The early church took Him at His word and went East, West, North and South. -J. Howard Edington What''s your dream and to what corner of the missions world will it take you? -Eleanor Roat, Missions Mobilizer We can reach our world, if we will. The greatest lack today is not people or funds. The greatest need is prayer. -Wesley Duewel, head of OMS International Love is the root of missions; sacrifice is the fruit of missions. -Roderick Davis Missionary zeal does not grow out of intellectual beliefs, nor out of theological arguments, but out of love. -Roland Allen