How to prepare for a family mission trip

As a World Race Alumni heading out tomorrow on an inaugural family mission trip, I thought it would be immensely helpful for me to write from my expertise about how to prepare. The following sequence of events are an excellent suggestion.

1) Break something.
A good choice would be your phone that doubles as your email, personal worship, Bible, child-entertainer for the plane, and general life manager. Even just a little drop on the ground to crack the screen will suffice.

2) Fight.
From the broken item, decide to not consult your husband on how to best fix it and just go down your own path. Then come home to fight about said fix. Then spend the evening undoing said fix and going the husbands route. Then find out that his route didn't work, spend the next day undoing that and redoing your fix. This will get your heart in a great place.

3) Freak out about packing.
Realize that you MUST bring EVERYTHING your child owns in order for him to survive this trip. Guarantee yourself multiple times that if you miss something, the entire trip will be ruined. Again, excellent way to prepare your heart.

4) Forget.
Your choice on this one. Anything you forget will serve to continue in the added stressing, freaking, and general panic. In our case the best choice was to forget to tell the rest of the team when and where to meet and those final packing details. This will not only help you stress that you forget but will also make sure that every person on the team calls you to find out the details you forgot.

5) Fast and pray.
No no… not fasting and praying for the trip… fast and pray that work is incredibly slow tomorrow so that you can leave early to go figure out again how to pack everything your child owns into 50 lbs. When God provides here…. definitely don't stop to thank Him. Just run like the wind to go keep organizing and re-organizing.

6) Shop.
You need the stress relief after all. So decide to look for those last necessary items at a minimum of 3 stores instead of just 1. The shopaholic in you will be thankful… and the procrastination is always a good idea.

7) In the midst of driving to all three stores, stop and write a blog in the parking lot.
Again.. procrastination is always a good choice.

8) And finally…. in the midst of writing the blog realize that God is absolutely at work, chaos is completely normal (and you actually are designed to function well under the chaos)…. ask your wonderful blog readers to join in celebrating what God is up to and join in prayer.

9) Freak out a little bit more while trying to repack without so much stuff.

10) Take a deep breath.

11) …and go.

Some good activities for the plane include apologizing to your husband for the damage from the debris-slinging tornado called YOU the past 48 hours…