Going Back to Nassau Hall

Well, it was more like Nassau Hall came to me!  Three weeks ago Josiah and I went to Quito to welcome the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship Ecuador Spring Break Mission Trip 2010!  Their flight arrived late Saturday night and our friend Kevin Skillin went with me to pick them up from the airport in his P '96 sweatshirt.  For the first time I regretted leaving my P '92 sweatshirt in Houston away from Shell's mold and humidity. On a side note, we became friends with the Skillins through our son Samuel and their daughter Laura who were best buddies in Kindergarten during out 9 months of language training in Quito and later figured out our Princeton and PEF connection.  Anyway, the bus driver that I hired for the PEF team (who talked to me by phone several times that night) did not actually show up at the airport, so Kevin ended up shuttling the team to the Guesthouse in his mini-van.  Glitches like this are par for the course here in Ecuador, but what a crazy welcome to the team!  The next day we headed  to Shell.  The 10 students and 4 leaders spent their week doing construction at Casa de Fe, the orphanage in Shell.  They also taught PE, art and reading to the orphanage kids as well as led chapel, art and PE at the missionary school.  Five pre-med students spent a day at the hospital and to top it all, they painted our church building in a near-by town inside and out in one day!  For a great slide-show of the trip see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVwAxCWocfI

It's hard to express how much this PEF visit meant to me.  PEF played a significant role in maturing my faith while I was in college and it was incredible to be able to play a small role in the faith of students 20 years behind me.  It also caused me to reflect on my years at Princeton and since graduation in a way that I seldom think about.  Until planning this trip, Princeton occupied little of my life except for several close friends, a few connections made on Facebook and Reunions every 5 years.  I remember sitting in PEF Freshman Bible Study listening to someone tell us possible reasons God may have brought us to Princeton.  Maybe it would open doors in our future careers that would bring God glory.  This reason appealed to me, but as far as I know, it didn't work that way in my life.  Maybe because I didn't tell people where I went to college unless pressured!  Anyway, this week with PEF made me think of the verse in Esther, "And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?"  Maybe part of the reason for Princeton then as well as for Shell now is this mission trip and this generation of Christian students from my alma mater.  Missions wasn't on my radar at Princeton and I was not sure I wanted to be a doctor.  But twenty years later I am able to testify to the clear hand of God's leading in my life, demonstrate the incredible diversity of missions in a small jungle town, and share the great privelege of God's call for all Christians to go, send or facilitate the world-wide spread of the Gospel.