Doing Not Feeling: When You Don’t Get the Mission Trip/Camp Spiritual "High"

By: Alice Fugate

I’m about to go on my high school’s summer mission trip to Quito, Ecuador—as a chaperone. I have been out of high school and in college for three years. This summer, I now have the wonderful opportunity to return to my Ecuadorian church family and serve both them and twenty-three students from my high school.

Here’s what I want these students and any high schooler going on a summer mission trip (or to a ministry-related summer camp) to know. It’s something I wish I had heard when I was in high school:

It’s okay if you don’t get the spiritual/camp "high."

Christians often talk about the spiritual/camp "high"—either in such a way that makes everyone expect it as a guaranteed element of a summer mission trip or camp, or else in a cynical way that says, “Oh, trust me, it doesn’t last forever.”

When you’re hearing a moving Gospel message, digging in the dirt, picking up trash, teaching children English, walking through poverty-stricken neighborhoods, painting houses—know that it is okay if you are not moved to tears. Don’t feel pressured to be hyper-spiritual and don’t force or fake the spiritual "high." There isn’t much use in forcing yourself to feel more than you do.

If God wants you to feel something, then chances are He will let that or make that happen (see the C.S. Lewis quote below). However, if He does not, it does not mean something is wrong with you or that you are doing something wrong. You may not be the type of believer that cries easily, nor the extroverted or impressionable girl that gushes her heart out to everyone within earshot. And if you are that girl, that’s okay too! We need believers of all kinds so that all kinds of people can be ministered too, believers or nonbelievers. Be yourself, and be open to God.

C.S. Lewis writes in his book Mere Christianity, “Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will. If we are trying to do His will, we are obeying the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’ He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right. But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not” (Book 3, Chapter 9: Charity, pages 132-133).

For my part, I went on this same mission trip to Ecuador every summer of high school, and while I learned a lot and had valuable experiences doing God’s work overseas—and hopefully obeyed His command to love—I don’t remember getting a spiritual high that dramatically changed me.

I learned more as I looked back on the trip after I had graduated high school. When I remember the trip, I cite it as something that solidified my faith in God’s existence. My senior year of high school I was assigned a paper in which I was to defend my beliefs—whether they were in God or not (I went to a Christian high school).

I remember writing that I knew God was real because I had seen Him in Ecuador.

While I was there, I saw and heard tales of miracles: the miraculous healing of a large lump in a boy’s stomach after weeks of prayer, the story of how a school director’s child was pronounced dead in her stomach during pregnancy, but how she refused to accept that because God somehow revealed to her that the child would live, and then she did indeed give birth to a boy, how God had provided funds for the school where we served time and time again.

I saw Him in the faces of the people I served, who were also serving me, in the kind of loving relationship God intends for us to have with each other.

These are things I saw and heard but were not things that happened to me directly, and as such did not affect me emotionally while I was there. However, as time passed and I reflected on the trip, these things became truths I now know, even if they are not always truths I feel. The mission trip gave me this gift: that when I answer the question of how I know God exists, I think about Ecuador.

Ephesians 2:10 states, “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."

This verse does not say God prepared good works for you to feel anything about; it says He prepared good works for you to do.

Your good works might look different than someone else’s. You might grow more from a different experience because you are wired in a certain, unique way.

Everyone’s faith journey looks—and is—different.

This is something I am learning more and more in college, where there is a lot more variety in the types of Christians I meet and relate to. Most of the believers at my high school more or less agreed with the same theology, came from similar backgrounds, expressed similar opinions. In college, every believer was radically different. It frightened me sometimes because it was so new and unfamiliar, but the more believers I’ve met and the more I’ve come to know, love, and admire, the more I believe that people experience God and talk about God in very different ways.

It is a very beautiful thing.

It is true that the "high", if you get it, wears off. That doesn’t necessarily invalidate your experience. Your everyday faith walk isn’t always going to feel like being at camp or being in a place like Ecuador.

It is still your faith walk. You are called to walk it in faithfulness and trust even when you don’t feel like it and even when you don’t feel close to God. Jesus came to bring you close to himself (Ephesians 2:12-13, 17-18), and his promises are true even when we don’t feel like they are, even when we feel far away.

Recently, I went through the hardest year of my life to date, and in my suffering, I honestly did not always feel that God was good.

But thankfully He is always good, no matter what I say, think, or feel.

If the experiences you have this summer don’t speak to you like your teammate who is crying and pouring out her new testimony to the group with enraptured eyes, then maybe it is not God’s intent for you.

You are not spiritually inferior, or not a real believer, or not doing it right if you don’t have a dramatic change of heart. If you do have a dramatic change of heart, praise God! And praise God if your teammate or friend has that change of heart!

That being said, neither should you write off your mission trip experience as worthless before you even go or while you are there. If you know you are the type that does not cry at services or at the first sign of poverty, do not unconsciously steel yourself against it. Ask God to open your heart to what He might teach you; you could be surprised at what you’ll see, learn, or even feel. Be patient if it doesn’t become apparent immediately. He has grace for us all, and He shows it to us in His good time, not ours.

So when you’re on this mission trip or at that camp, even if you don’t get emotional about the work you’re doing, or don’t feel that your life is suddenly completely different and transformed by your experience, know that you are still doing good work for God and still devoting good time to God and his people.

As Lewis writes, “Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will” not of the emotions. We are called to act out love, not necessarily feel it too.

Alice Fugate is a college student in Memphis, Tennessee, but hails from Atlanta, Georgia. She loves running, writing, tea, travel, fairy tales and Southern literature. She's learning day by day what it means to walk with God and hopes that her writing can glorify him.