I See You, I Know You, and I Love You

Luke Dove is a CMF missionary working with kids from broken and impoverished backgrounds in Guatemala City. Here he shares about an annual trip where kids join a team of high school students from the US and, together, spend a week out in a village serving others. 

One of my favorite weeks of the year is our Youth Mission Trip, where my home church, Shelby Christian Church in Kentucky, brings down their high school students to build homes and put on a VBS for a week out in a poor village of Guatemala, and invites some of my students to spend the week with them serving in this community.

This year we were able to take 7 of our students from the community center, along with my wife and myself, to serve in the town of Santa Maria de Jesus building 5 homes for families that don’t have a real place to call home. Before these families received the nice wood homes with cement floors and a sturdy metal roof, many of them lived in shacks made of tree limbs as corner posts holding up corrugated sheet metal as walls with gaps above and below, with maybe a metal roof placed over the top but full of holes and held down by string or a few nails. To be able to give this gift of a new home, to bless this family with something that they didn’t earn or pay for or really do anything to get besides say yes and accept the gift, is a powerful experience and makes you reflect on your own relationship with Jesus and the salvation he offers.

I was able to see the 39 American high school students, of which I was once one, alongside of my 7 students from the ghetto, laughing and playing and working and sweating (and bleeding, but that wasn’t any of the Guatemalans who I was responsible for), and building relationships that will last a lifetime that will change lives and hearts and futures perhaps in the same way my life and heart and future was changed when I came down on this same trip 12 years ago.

I am always profoundly impacted that my students come on this trip, which is the best vacation they’ve ever had in their lives, where they eat three times a day, sleep in their own bed, and have hot water, things they have never had in their lives, and they come to build houses that are better than the houses they themselves live in, and they give them away for free. And to see what that does over the course of the week to their heart (and mine too) is so cool. There isn’t a drop of jealously in them even though it would be very easy to have it, and their faith and passion grows and grows as they realize that even though they don’t have any money or any possessions to give to the families in this community that just by their actions and sweat they can change the course of that family’s life. They begin to see that they can be used by God even though their world has told them they don’t have value.

And one of the things that moves my heart the most, and one of the reasons why this trip continues to be one of my favorite of the year and something that marks a distinct before and after for the students from the community center who go on it, is that at the end of the week, some of our students decide to share their testimonies and stories with the American group. They don’t have to, it’s only if they want to, but that night is so incredibly powerful.

I have known the 7 kids who I brought on this trip for a number of years now. I have been with them in their good days and bad days, I have been in their homes, we have had more conversations than I can count and have spent, conservatively, hundreds of hours together. All of them have come from some incredible hardships, surviving abuses and poverty and neglect and they are all constantly facing things more difficult than most Americans could imagine. And then on that last night, after having felt closer to God than maybe they have ever felt in their lives they decide to trust him even more and open up their hearts to some people that were complete strangers at the beginning of the week but now are close friends. And they throw themselves into hope and trust and say, “You all have loved me without truly knowing me, and now I want to give you a chance to truly know me.” And they’re nervous and they bare their heart and then they wait, they wait to see how the group will react. Will they still love me when they know the real me? Will they love me when they learn what I have gone through and where I come from? And of course, the group responds with tears and applause and more hugs and more love than you can imagine.

That night, this trip, just reminds me every year why what we do is so important. That this is what it actually looks like to empower kids from broken and impoverished backgrounds, to treat them with dignity and raise them up and help them feel the hope and love of our Lord. That incarnational ministry is so important, because we can stand in that gap between the seen and the unseen and say, “I see you, I know you, and I love you. But you have a Heavenly Father who sees, knows, and loves you more than I ever could.”