As a Trip Leader, can I choose where I go?
The short answer is . . . no. As a first-year Trip Leader, you will not get to choose where you’d like to serve; we will assign you a location based on a variety of factors, including how your personality type will match up with your co-leader, your language ability, and lots and lots of prayer. Believe us, placing over 300 Trip Leaders is difficult, and it takes a lot of time and effort and prayer without having to consider 300+ different location preferences. But let’s be real, even if it were possible to allow each first-year Trip Leader to pick their location, doing so would detract from the real purpose of these trips.
This trip is not a vacation—if you’re hoping to get a free trip, look elsewhere
We say this all the time, but HXP is 100% about the Builders. It’s about each and every one of these teenagers who have their own struggles and their own needs. Some are extremely lonely. Some have questions about who they are and what their purpose is. Others struggle with depression and anxiety. The point is, although we don’t have a list of every trial they’re experiencing right now, we know most of them are going through something really tough. If your focus is where we ask for it to be—on these kids—then it really shouldn’t matter where you go. If we sent you with 19 teenagers to Kansas, we hope you’d be stoked. If we send you to your dream location, you’re allowed to be excited, but we pray you’ll stay focused on your kids and not become a distracted tourist. In essence, your role as a Trip Leader has nothing to do with where you are and everything to do with who you are and who these kids are
We know that the idea of traveling to Fiji or Cambodia or Peru is pretty exciting in and of itself, but we always try and help our Trip Leaders remember that—in all honesty—it doesn’t matter where you go. At all. It’s not about the location. It never has been, and it never will be.
At HXP, we know that we serve people, not places. We see it every summer, when a Trip Leader comes home and tells us about their spiritual confirmations, tender mercies, and promptings they had felt prior to or during their trip to help a specific Builder. You may think your assignment is done randomly, but there is no coincidence in the miracles He has planned for you and His children.