Results May Vary

Trey Calhoun is not a morning person. His older brother Cooper has to threaten to tip him out of bed just to get him to church on time, where Pastor Wilson Knox is commissioning an eleven-person team for a medical mission trip to the Dominican Republic. The team is led by Trey's father, Dr. Joseph Calhoun, who is thrilled that for the first time his whole family - his wife Kayla, Cooper, and Trey - will be going along. After the service, elderly Mrs. Lucia Ortega pulls Trey aside and tells him she senses a special quality in him, and that when the offering plate came around, she gave because of him. Cooper, who saw her drop in about a hundred dollars, cheerfully piles on the pressure: "You gotta make $100 worth of impact down there."

When the family returns home a week later, something is wrong with Trey. He is quiet, calls himself overwhelmed, and mysteriously asks his parents for extra chores so he can earn money for a purpose he refuses to explain. Stranger still, the boy who could never wake up starts rising before everyone else and making waffles for the family. Over breakfast he confesses his worry to Cooper: he is dreading the family's interview at the Sunday night service, because as far as he can tell, the trip was a disaster for him. The Dominican kids nicknamed him "El Fastidio" - the annoying boy - and avoided him so thoroughly that, in his words, scorpions were more welcome in people's homes.

At the Sunday service, everyone else has a wonderful story. Kayla tells how a girl named Anna, born with badly mismatched vision, found among a box of donated glasses the one pair that exactly matched her unusual prescription and even fit her head, letting her see clearly for the first time in her life. Joseph tells of Moses, a joyful man who lost both legs below the knee in a farming accident, walks with two canes and his shoes worn backwards on his stumps, and never complains, because the first thing he does every morning is thank God for the gift of life. Happiness, Moses says, is a decision, not a result of easy circumstances. Cooper describes playing baseball with the village kids from sunrise until after dark - even by glow-in-the-dark ball - and the friendships and encouragement that grew out of it. Then Pastor Knox asks Trey how God used him, and Trey, with nothing real to say, spirals into a string of increasingly ridiculous metaphors, comparing himself to a reusable dish rag and then to seeds "fertilized by love, raked by joy, and weed-whacked by the truth."

At home afterward, once Cooper is banished to his room for teasing, Trey finally tells his parents the truth: he blew it. The children avoided him, even Sal, a lonely little blind boy who somehow always sensed him coming, and a boy named Manuel once dove into a crocodile-infested river just to get away from him. His parents gently tell him that he did his best, that God asks nothing more, and that we often never learn what difference we have made. Just then Pastor Knox stops by - partly to apologize for not preparing Trey for the interview, and partly to deliver something: the church has received dozens of thank-you emails from the Dominican Republic, and one of them, written in Spanish, is addressed to Trey. It is from Manuel. Knox leaves it untranslated, reminding Trey that God often uses people in small ways, even invisible ones, and that our job is to work with a pure heart and leave the results to God.

Instead of translating the letter online, Trey asks his mom to drive him to Mrs. Ortega's house, where she reads it aloud: "Dear Trey, do you have my headphones?" That is the entire message - Manuel just wants to know if Trey took his headphones by mistake. Crushed, Trey pulls out fifteen dollars earned from weeding and chores and tries to begin repaying Mrs. Ortega's hundred dollars in monthly installments, insisting she invested in him and got nothing back. She refuses the money. She explains that she never gave only to bless the people overseas; she gave because she believed the trip would change Trey, since mission trips usually change us more than the people we visit. When Trey doubts he changed at all, Kayla points out the evidence: a boy who once had to be dragged from bed has been up before dawn, cheerful, making waffles. Trey realizes it was Moses. Ever since the trip, he has been waking up and thanking God for life the moment his eyes open - and it makes him want to serve his family. Mrs. Ortega smiles: "Then it sounds like I did get my money's worth."

Later, the family holds its own slideshow night at home, which Trey finds far less terrifying than the whole church. Cooper's flashy, music-backed presentation sums up his week in two words - "eternal glory" - while Trey shows a child's painting of the family, a photo of kids supposedly playing tag but actually fleeing from him, and finally a picture of Moses, smiling as always. Trey admits he does not know whether Moses even liked him, but he is sure of one thing: Moses is the reason God sent him to the Dominican Republic, and he made the whole trip worth it.