ATLANTA (BP)–“What do you want to do when you graduate?”
The question usually garners a blank stare from college students still struggling to even choose a major. But college sophomore Whitni Bledsoe responds with a passion that may chart the course for the rest of her life.
“The day after I graduate, I want to go somewhere,” Bledsoe said. “I really feel like God is so good and so huge that I just want to share Him with the nations, with people that don’t know Him. Whether it’s in the Middle East, or Africa or Asia, wherever God sends me, I’m ready.”
On July 6, Bledsoe responded to God’s call as a member of a short-term mission team sent to Beirut, Lebanon, by Eagle’s Landing First Baptist Church near Atlanta. Through the church’s partnership with Lebanese Baptists, the team led a children’s camp for approximately 60 children, built relationships with the local people and prayerwalked a neighborhood their church had adopted.
But on July 12 as Bledsoe helped with the second day of the camp, painting children’s faces and handing out balloons, the look on a Lebanese worker’s face let her know that something was wrong.
“My country is at war,” the worker cried.
With these words, the mission trip took a dramatic turn as the Israel-Hezbollah conflict unfolded over the next few days. Bledsoe remembers a night when the sound of war was so close that she couldn’t sleep. In the middle of the night, the team sat together and just worshiped.
“You could tell we were worshiping because nobody jumped when the bombs would go off, no one was crying,” Bledsoe said. “We just sat there and were like, ‘OK, God, you’re God in the middle of this.’”
The team’s original departure date of July 14 came and went, as the team finished the children’s camp and began ministering to both Lebanese believers and the refugees who began to pour into the Beirut Baptist School and the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary.
“I tended to gravitate toward the children,” Bledsoe said. “There’s nothing worse than being a child and being scared and finding yourself in a weird place with none of your toys. So we’d pick them up, give them candy, give them anything we had.”
By doing what college students do best -– building relationships and keeping it real -– Bledsoe and two other team members also were able to use the time of conflict and uncertainty to share their faith with Lebanese refugees their age. One 21-year-old woman Bledsoe met was devastated by what was happening to her country.
“She said, ‘This is my country, I don’t want to see it fall apart again,’” Bledsoe said. “So we said, ‘We’ll pray to our God, we’ll pray to Jesus for you.’ She said, ‘I’ve heard of Him, but I don’t know who that is.’ It was so cool the next night at prayer meeting, there she was.”
On July 20, Bledsoe and the other eight members of her team began their three-day evacuation back to the United States. As this particular ministry with the people of Lebanon ended, the evacuation process left Bledsoe feeling like she had been ministered to.
“We kept thinking how that the day before, we’d [assembled] these bags of food for the refugees and suddenly we were the refugees,” she said. “We had served God for two weeks and suddenly we found ourselves being served.”
This life-changing experience in serving God has only confirmed the call to missions Bledsoe accepted in the ninth grade at a camp in Daytona Beach, Fla. It’s a calling she would encourage any college student to consider -– either the short- or long-term.
“Billy Edmonds [president of ITAM Ministries] says that a mission trip isn’t about one week of the year, but it’s about how you’re going to live the other 51 [weeks],” Bledsoe said. “It changes your perspective, the things you’re able to see change you. And you’ll find that it’s addicting…. [Y]ou’ve got to have more. You’ve got to have more.”
Given Bledsoe’s passion for missions, when she accepted God’s call to travel to Lebanon this summer, her parents thought: “OK, God, this is how it starts.”
“It’s been our prayer all these years that our children will grow up and serve Him,” said Bledsoe’s mother, Teri. “You spend 18 years teaching them about God’s principles and precepts and then it comes time to pass that faith to them. It’s the realization that they are in God’s hand.”
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