Malawi Trip Recap - Matt Good

It has been almost two weeks since I landed back in America and I can still remember the kid’s faces distinctly in my head. I’ve come to realize these images of the kids smiling and laughing will never leave me. I have my wallpaper on my phone set as a picture of me and some the kids in Malawi because the pictures remind me of the love the kids showed us. Before the trip people who had been a mission trip had constantly advised me “when you leave you will feel as if the kids had more of an impact on your life than you did on theirs”. I listened to what they had to say, but I had no idea how true that statement would be. Over the three weeks that I spent in Malawi I formed a relationship with these kids. I felt like an older brother to some of them and it broke my heart to have to leave them. The kids would open up to me about situations in their life and I would tell them about how I had similar situations that had happened to me. The relationships that I built with the kids would change how I looked at life. I was amazed by the amount of care and love in which they showed. The kids offered to do almost everything for us, the kids willingly helped us set up the volleyball nets for volleyball day, they would offer to carry our things for us so that we did have to carry them, and they would ask us about our families all the time. The kids showed me, an outsider, a type of love that would impact my life forever.
              
​Seeing how much the kids cared about us and loved us helped me understand how I should act around everyone at home. The kids showed a love to me that I feel that I must share to others also. As I was reading through my Bible about a week ago, I ran across the verses in John 13: 34-35 and it states “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” The last sentence in this verse says that everyone will know I am a disciple of His if I love one another. As I read this verse I thought about the love the kids in Malawi showed me and thought to myself “If I showed half the amount of love that the kids had to everyone around me, I then would be following that commandment.” The kids in Malawi will never leave my heart or my mind, and I wish I could tell them one more time how much they have impacted my life.