Taking children on mission trips to places with less safety and comfort can benefit them in several ways: 1) It builds compassion and character by immersing them in a different world where people live with less. 2) It inoculates them against consumerism and helps protect them from depression by changing their views on the importance of material goods and problems. 3) While initially scary due to risks, these trips may ultimately save a child's life by influencing them to make safer choices as teenagers compared to if they were not exposed to different realities of life.

1. SHOULD YOU TAKE YOUR
CHILD SOMEPLACE
DANGEROUS?

2. Should you take your child
someplace
where the water is not safe?

3. Where they could be
injured far from an
English-speaking doctor

4. Someplace where the police
might take bribes?

5. Yes

6. And it might save their life
when
they are a teenager.

7. My wife Katharine
and I have gone on
five church mission
trips with our
daughters:
three times to
Mexico and twice to
Guatemala.

8. Our first trip was a
short hop across
the border to
Juarez for two
days. Twenty-one
children, twenty
parents and one
grandparent built
two houses.

9. The homes had
three rooms, each
12 feet by 12 feet.
Our younger
daughter had just
turned seven.

10. I don’t know which was scarier:
Watching my 7 year-old climb up
on the roof with a hammer
or…

11. Or watching her run around,
playing with barefoot children
who lived in packing crates
in the desert.

12. Nine years later, when she was a
senior in high school, and we
chaperoned 60 American high
school students on a mission trip
to Mexicali.

13. These two busloads of teens
came home with a
changed view of life.

14. They are less concerned about
designer jeans.

15. They are less worried about their
problems—which somehow
seem smaller.

16. How can short trips like these
save your child’s life?

17. How can trips that immerse our
children into a world with less safety
and comfort actually protect them?

18. Because it builds compassion

19. It builds character.

20. Because it inoculates them
from consumerism

21. Because it helps protect them
from depression

22. Is playing on an unpaved
Mexicali road
safer than
the keys to your car on a
Saturday night?

23. Take your child someplace
dangerous and find out.