How the Spring Break I Never Wanted Changed My Life
At that crucial point in every person’s life, where high school graduation approaches and forging one’s ‘own way’ becomes an exciting reality, I unexpectedly found myself in the rural outskirts of Mexico City.
My preoccupation with building the perfect future for myself was immediately put on hold as spring break in my Grade 12 year was spent building homes and visiting orphanages.
The existential “What am I doing with my life? Why am I here?” are natural enough questions to any senior student, and perhaps more so as one endures sunburn and cactus rashes by day, tarantulas by night, and generally hobbles through a foreign language. However, I believe I had a little more claim to this soul-searching questioning because I wasn’t supposed to be there. This interruption had never been in my plan.
A month or two before the trip, some friends and I had received acceptance into our universities of choice and figured we best celebrate with a spring break grad trip to a Mexico beach resort. When I boldly informed my father of my upcoming plans, I was met with a flat and simple, “No”.
Clearly, my father’s ways were not my ways, nor my thoughts his thoughts.
To my surprise, however, my father added that I would still go to Mexico, however it would be with him and my younger brother. My initial confusion met the explanation that the St. Thomas Aquinas staff had just approached my dad asking him to be the medical chaperone for an upcoming school mission trip in Mexico. He had accepted, but bargained to bring two sons along—one of whom was not at all affiliated with the school (me) and the other who was an STA student (my brother) but only in Grade 10. Surprisingly, they agreed. Thus, with a smile, my father concluded that I best start packing my bags, swim trunks and flip flops not needed.
Now some weeks later, I found myself in the dusty hills outside Mexico City with a handful of students I barely knew, struggling to sling a bag of concrete over my shoulder without bumping into a free-roaming goat and chicken, and all the while climbing a creaking ladder. I wondered often—with envy and resentment—what my friends were up to on the beach just a few hours away. In those first few days of honest work, however, I thought less and less of the beach or even my future as I grew more attentive to the way of life laid out immediately before me; a life with all manner of surprises: learning how to frame rebar on the job site, a few ‘spanglish’ games of scrabble, some unidentifiable-yet-delicious street food. Imperceptibly, I had begun to experience the wisdom in the words “as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways”. This mission trip was never part of my own plans, and yet what a joy it was proving itself to be.
In the closing days of the trip, we visited various orphanages. One visit remains at the forefront of my mind in all its original vivacity: the children had invited a few of us to play soccer with them in the courtyard. I was playing keeper and quickly tore my jeans, and in a brief pause, as the ball soared to the other end, I suddenly realized these were my favourite pair. To my own surprise, I laughed, realizing that over a few short days what had meant so much to me back home had been exposed as having so little real value. Wondering if my dad had noticed, I looked across the courtyard and saw him attending to some severely crippled children, all bedridden, some of whom had been looking longingly at our soccer game. As my father bent over to check one child’s pulse, she threw her arms up, wrapping her arms around his neck, innocently thinking he had come over to give her a hug. Within that sudden vignette composed of this girl’s happy grin and my stooped father fighting back tears, all surrounded by the happy screams of children at play, I unexpectedly and forcefully encountered the joy of living a way that was not my own way.
The spring break plans I had initially made for myself were, like the jeans, nothing but one more opportunity for self-seeking emptiness and vanity, with classmates I couldn’t honestly call friends. And yet here before me, somewhere in a remote mountain village in Mexico, the plan I had not at all wanted—physical labour, sweating, upset stomachs, but also friendships, group prayer, meaningful relationships--was revealing its true nature as a plan from God, that is, so much higher than my ways.
I left that mission trip knowing beyond all doubt that the plans God had orchestrated for my life were the plans that will always far exceed my own.
A few days later and spring break had ended and school resumed as normal. I saw my classmates after their own Mexico trip, and although they were nicely tanned and shared lively stories, each had in their eyes a glaze of deep existential boredom I had never previously noticed. With longing, my thoughts soon turned back to my new friends from the Mexico Encounter.
From that same mission trip came friendships that have lasted beyond high school, beyond university, and through to the next stages of life. It was these same friends that gave me a joyful example of living a Catholic life, which eventually lead me to my own personal encounter with God at twenty years old. Now, 11 years later, as I’ve just been recently ordained as a deacon (and soon after, a priest), it is these same friends that continue to support me, and I them, as together we follow God’s ways into marriage, priesthood, religious life, and even parenting. Might I add that with these friends, I’ve also managed to travel near and far to many beaches.
From my own firsthand experience on that Mexico Encounter trip, I know and can promise each of you that God our Father has crafted your life as an adventure: His thoughts and ways for you and I are, without a question, so much higher--and simply better --than our own thoughts and ways.
There remains an absolutely critical decision you and I must make often, a decision eternally more important than the choice of university or preferred career: the choice to accept or reject God’s invitation to step into His way for us. Are you willing to trade in the certain but lifeless bet of our earthly ways for the greater adventure of His heavenly way?
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isa 55:8-9)
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