My father, Douglas Drevets, graduated from Wheaton College.  His freshman year of college he reconnected with an old friend from middle school summer camp, Seth Barnes. They quickly became fast friends.  During their stay on campus, along with a motley crew of companions, they staged a noble and prolonged effort to liven the other students’ quality of life with colorful antics such as disrupting chapel, covering toilet seats with plastic wrap (my dad’s idea), and engaging in other acts of public menace. They eventually graduated, were employed at various...

Cora Healey traveled to the Philippines this summer, with AIM’s Ambassador program.  They got the opportunity to work in slums of Manila and she shares some of her experience below. Our team had the opportunity to go with Cebu City Alliance Church (CCAC) to feed and teach a Bible story to a group of children in a village in the city. Once we were done teaching, the kids lined up to be served food and I stood off to the side to watch.   There was a little girl kneeling down in the dirt next to me and I knelt down and attempted to ask her what her name was....

“You wouldn’t understand. You just had to be there.” Words such as these are often rooted in ignorance or insecurities that destroy conversations before they’ve started. In truth, we’re all guilty of such rhetoric at some time or another.   Our youth return from short-term mission trips and aren’t quite sure how to put their experiences into words, or maybe they (and we?) are tempted to exercise some sort of experiential superiority over their peers who were not on the trip.   Whatever their reasons for not properly communicating the...

This week, a group of young adults went into the Kenyan slums during their Real Life mission trip.   To say the very least, it was a life-changing experience for them. On the Kenya blog, you can read their in-depth reports, but we’ll highlight just a few here.   Amy Johnson remarked on the unimaginable sights she saw in Kibera: Imagine: smelling burning trash, food cooking from little shacks, and trash dumps.  Imagine: feeling the rough, dirty hands of children all over your skin because they have never seen a white person before.  Imagine: seeing shack after...