The past few weekends have been a very unsettled time for me. In the past two months, I have traveled to Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Kentucky and always ended up back home in Tennessee by Monday. It has been stressful to travel such great distances over the course of a weekend, and homework and tests may have suffered because of it. However, I would not change any of these little adventures. For as long as I can remember I have loved going new places and immersing myself in new communities. It gives me a sense of peace, to know that other lives and places exist, function, and flourish outside of my field of experience. For me, the joy of traveling is not so much in the destination, but in the action of leaving what you know and going on to something else.

As Robert Louis Stevenson so eloquently phrased it, "For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."

The great affair is to move.

Isn't that kind of a biblical principle? There are literally thousands of reasons that people give to travel. My favorite things about travel are that you gain knowledge, meet new people, and gain an amazing story to tell. The reasons that I am focusing on as I go on to mission trip in West Virginia this week are slightly different.

1. Give Knowledge

Rather than finding out where to get the best smoothies, my focus is going to be on giving knowledge to others. Mission trips vary from regular travel because our goal is to serve others, rather than enjoy our own free time. Do not misunderstand, great joy comes with our travels. We meet new people and are undoubtedly affected by their influence. However, our main purpose will remain in serving others by introducing them to the knowledge of Christ.

2. Meet new people

This one stays the same. The excitement of meeting new people and developing relationships is one that has always appealed to me. Being connected to others is one of the greatest joys that we can have as human beings, fostering these connections with people outside of our immediate area is an even greater blessing. We live in this time of connection where people can be thousands of miles away and we can still talk to them with ease.

3. Give an amazing story to tell.

Be a light to the people you travel to. Show them the love of Christ so that when you leave, they feel compelled to tell others about the light of Christ that they witnessed in you. This is the most important aspect of travel, this is how you scratch your way into the history of the places that you visit. Do something remarkable, and tell others who you serve and why you did it.

So go. Go travel, make a few dumb decisions, love the people you are with, and do your best to change the lives of those people that live there wherever you go.