“I came looking for answers. I found that my whole life is mission.”
Samantha Pandolfi, Arizona
Samantha came on a discernment trip after going on multiple short-term mission trips, wondering whether Christ might be calling her to full-time missions. She discovered that the answer she was seeking wasn't quite what she expected.
I first met the Erismans and The Francis Institute during a spring break mission trip earlier this year. During that time, Jesus moved powerfully in my heart, in the people we served, and in the lives of the other missionaries.
I fell in love with mission 20 years ago, when I was 14, and since then mission trips have always been a place where my heart comes alive and I feel most myself. They have almost always been roughly two-week periods of Jesus pouring Himself out, speaking, healing, and breathing new life into places in the heart waiting to be restored—both mine and others’.
While serving with the Francis Institute, I was moved by witnessing the authentic gospel lived out in all of its simplicity and depth. The missionaries served with love, and I saw Jesus in their humility and the way they lived. Their rhythm of life was rooted in the life of the Church, and it was beautiful to experience the Holy Spirit moving in new and miraculous ways each day.
These experiences, and the many short term trips I had taken, brought me to a place where I longed to discover if there was more for me, possibly as a full-time missionary. In the last days of that spring break mission, I sensed Jesus inviting me to come back and encouraging me to trust the Erismans as I continued discerning.
Three months later I landed again in Tarapoto, greeted by hugs and smiles.
It’s hard to take your heart and put it into words. It’s hard to articulate how a slow morning of prayer and trying to absorb enough caffeine for most of your words to come out in comprehensible Spanish… how little trips back and forth in a motocar to bring lunch to a sweet, homebound couple… how seeing the light of Jesus in the smiling eyes of a man who lost both of his legs but still had hope enough to share… how a family of eight children with an open door and open hearts…. or how a girl with a heart that holds all of Peru and still made room for me somehow translates into the answers I came looking for.
There is a lot of wisdom behind The Francis Institute planning discernment trips without a strict agenda or big events. Entering into the poverty and littleness of daily life "on mission" initially challenged my idealized understanding of mission, but ultimately revealed the dignity of my own everyday life “as mission.”
I left for my discernment mission trip with an anxiousness that sought to be settled by a sense of purpose I thought waited to be found outside of me. Somewhere between warm welcomes, visiting the sick, daily prayer, playing in homemade forts, Mass and the sacraments, workouts, handing out rosaries, and all the other little things that together make life so full, I found rest in the reality that my life is mission.
And for me, for now, it sent me home on a plane that landed back in Arizona.
“If you’ve ever wondered, my encouragement is to not be afraid of your desires and to trust that God will use the everyday circumstances of your life to bring you where He wants you to go.”
Yet, I can’t help but believe that there are many others who have similar desires and are looking for their own encounters, as well as many others, that God is calling to give their life to international full-time missions.
If you’ve ever wondered, my encouragement is to not be afraid of your desires and to trust that God will use the everyday circumstances of your life to bring you where He wants you to go.
If you are interested in taking time to discern that call more intentionally, I would encourage you to prayerfully consider spending time with The Francis Institute. It is certainly somewhere I’ve seen the mission Christ left His Church continued and is somewhere I have encountered Christ’s love.
I have found that intentionally going away on mission for a time has a way of helping us discover more fully who God created us to be. As Pope Saint John Paul II wrote, “Man cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.