TMI mission trips

My daughter’s gone for a summer of warm sun and tropical breezes in El Salvador where she will shovel dirt, mix cement and build a block wall. The day before she left, she asked me, “Know why I wore those clothes today? They’re everything I can’t wear the rest of the summer: Shorts, sleeveless and sandals.”
Like her brothers, she is spending one summer with Teen Missions International on a working mission trip. Unlike her brothers though she has done everything herself. With minimal input from me, she read through the manual of instructions, kept track of the funds people donated and initiated writing thank you notes. Then checklist in hand, she shopped for everything she needed to buy, weighed it all to ensure it totaled less 35 pounds and packed it in cardboard boxes (TMI provides matching duffel bags at their base in Merritt Island, Fla.)
As with her brothers, we left in the middle of the night to meet a TMI bus at a truck terminal west of Shreveport, La. When her oldest brother left, he posed for a flash picture at the side of the bus and hugged us good-bye with a smile that faded the instant he climbed into the bus as the weight of separation hit him. I stood there equally shocked, not believing I had actually agreed to two months of family activities without him.
We found a window seat and stared forlornly out the window at us. His face haunted me as we climbed back in our fan. The bus pulled out in front of us. “Let’s follow it,” I urged insistently.
We followed the bus until we reached our last possible exit for going home. Crossing the bridge over the four-lane highway we paused until his bus faded out of sight.
Four years later, we waited in the dark with his youngest brother. He bounced around the parking lot peering through the dark at incoming vehicles looking for the TMI bus. When it arrived, he tossed his boxes into the luggage compartment and ran for the steps, “Bye, Mom. Bye, Dad.”
“Don’t you want a hug good-bye?” He endured a quick hug, pulled away, ran to the bus, flopped down beside a half-awake teenager and began talking, never looking back at us. We didn’t follow his bus.
Last week, same truck depot, same pre-dawn wait for a TMI bus, but with a difference: We waited with other families from our church with teenagers going this summer with TMI: To Australia, to the Fiji Islands and another to Indiana with puppet ministry team. We chatted with each other and a couple other TMI families from Texarkana sending their daughters to France and Mali in Africa.
The bus was late. It was bright daylight when my daughter posed beside the bus for her picture. She made the round of family and friend giving everyone a hug good-bye. She smiled and boarded an empty bus after the sun was up. We couldn’t follow. We were heading east to a day of work. The bus went west to pick up other teens. Our summer of separation had begun.