"Wait… you take college students to Iceland for spring break?"

If you've been researching meaningful travel, alternative spring break programs, or international volunteer opportunities, you've probably come across the term service learning.

But what exactly does it mean?

Is it just another name for volunteering?

Is it a mission trip?

Does it count as community service?

For decades, the phrase mission trip has been synonymous with Christians traveling somewhere new to serve. Countless lives have been changed through these experiences, including our own.

At Compass Path, however, we intentionally describe most of our programs as faith-rooted service-learning journeys rather than mission trips.

This isn't because we're trying to avoid the word mission. Quite the opposite.

It's because we believe the mission begins long before we board a plane, and it continues long after we return home.

I love a good read. But this year, I couldn’t seem to find one that stuck. Then a few months ago, someone handed me a paperback mystery. The book sat on my shelf for a few weeks until one day I picked it up on a whim.

Iceland is known for dramatic weather. But this is surreal even by the standards of fire and ice.

Can you guess how many flowers, on average, a bee hive has to travel to and gather nectar from to make one pound of honey? (One pound, by the way, is roughly equivalent to those little teddy bear jars you see at the grocery store.) 

Earlier this month, four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific after becoming the first humans to fly around the moon in over fifty years. One of the astronauts, Christina Koch, stepped onto a stage in Houston, still finding her “earth legs,” and said something I haven’t been able to shake.