Dori Beach used to work in a women’s rescue shelter. She tells the story of a pregnant 15 year-old named Janice. Janice is representative of so many who are caught in the whirlpool of generational habits. She’s a victim of incest who has raised many of her mother’s nine children. While the average 15-year-old has only recently given up playing with dolls, Janice will soon have the responsibility of caring for a real baby. In an odd way, it is for her a status symbol, a signal that she has come of age. Her mother is hardly equipped to help; Janice will have to raise the...

Listening prayer–actively seeking God’s will and then following his instructions–is an important part of every mission trip. It’s one of the principles AIM works to teach to every trip participant from the leaders on down. Each morning during your trip, you’ll have time set aside to ask God what he wants from you that day and to listen for a response. If it’s not something you do every day, it can be a little bit weird. And, at times, it seems counterintuitive to what we’re supposed to do as youth workers. Our job is to control the chaos through...

At home, it’s pretty easy to rely on yourself (mostly, anyway) to get through the day. Get out into the mission field, though, and you have to start putting faith into practice in different and new ways. It’s like exercising spiritual muscles you never even knew existed. For teens, getting outside their comfort zone and facing the realities of life helps solidify faith and make it real. New situations lead to new growth, and just one experience can make an enormous difference in the course of their lives.  In this short video, three teenagers share what one day of...

A couple weeks ago, I came back from a missions trip to Haiti. It was a phenomenal experience, and although I hate to use the “life changing” cliche, I’ve decided that some things about my life at home are going to have to change. Call it a service high if you want, but I want to play a bigger role as a missionary in my own community. For me, that starts with a few simple tweaks and seeing what happens next. Make RelationshipsQuick– what’s the name of the barista at your favorite cafe? The guy behind the counter at the convenience store? Or even the couple that...