Over Christmas break, the high school youth mission team painted a parsonage for a small independent Baptist church in a small town on an island in the Florida Keys.

The house was tiny but well-loved by the young pastor, his wife and their three small children. It was on the back of the church property. The street next to the parsonage had the backs of the large oceanfront homes that make the Keys famous.

In the mornings, as we painted, people honked and waved as they drove past. Standing on her small porch with her infant child in our arms, the young mother told the teenagers that sometimes she heard people make fun of the house for its peeling khaki-colored paint.

“It’s so hard,” she said as her child fussed on her shoulder.

Mom was not talking about the house. As a new pastor in his first c…