more will be revealed

I’ve been meaning to share my experience from the Nashville trip but haven’t made the time to write about it since getting back 2 weeks ago. I have caught up with most of my work and am in a writing mood, so here we go.

Our team of sixteen was a good mix of people, with 3 families taking part, two high school students, several twenty-somethings, along with another person on staff at church. In the months before the trip, we did a bit of training and got our feet wet by serving at a local ministry here in Dayton that serves meals to the poor and homeless. I’m glad that we did that, even if it just helped me become comfortable serving the poor and homeless.

Center for Student Missions is the organization that organized all of the little details for the trip for us, and wow, what a job they did! A fellow colleague recommended going with them for our trip after her group experienced a great trip put on by CSM. Our church was looking to go on a mission trip for families, and CSM just happened to be trying to figure out a way to offer a trip for families, never having done one before since their main focus is middle and high school trips. So it really worked out quite well.

Our group was split in two groups, each one having a CSM host to guide us around the city each day. As the leader for the trip, I was able to just be in the moment each day to serve alongside the rest of the team because CSM had everything taken care of. It was so freeing! In past trips, I was always thinking “What’s coming up next? Do I have everything ready for that? How are we going to get there?” etc. But not with this trip. Our CSM host guided us to each ministry site, to the restaurants we went to for dinner, and they also handled the debriefs at the end of each day. I couldn’t have asked for anything more as a leader!

Vine Hill Boys & Girls Club

My group’s anchor site was the Vine Hill Boy’s & Girls Club. Each day we would come there and spend half of the day with the kids that showed up. All of us in my group were out of our comfort zones. Especially me. I’m not used to having 80 or so inner-city kids aged 6-16 running around me. I’m an introvert, not a big people person, so it was a bit challenging to initially connect with the kids. But I found my connection point at the end of our first day there: basketball. Each day I played ball with the guys: knockout, 1 on 1, 36, 3pt. shootout, mostly with the older kids. I found out towards the end of the week that the older guys generally did not have much interaction with the previous groups, since these guys were always playing ball. I can’t say that I had any significant spiritual conversations with any of the guys, but I do believe they had something to look forward to knowing myself (and the others as well) were there to hang out with them.

The Boy’s & Girls Club was putting on a talent show the week we were there and so much of their day was spent rehearsing for the show. That meant that their normal schedule was basically scrapped, and for those not in the show, they had the run of the gym. In other words, it was barely-controlled chaos! It was loud, kids were running around everywhere, and I had to break up scuffles between kids at least several times a day. By the end of the week, I found myself not exactly looking forward to going to the Club. I’d say a quick prayer though and ask God to help me willingly serve, and those feelings soon disappeared once I walked through the doors and started hanging out with the kids. I’m glad God placed our group at the Club, because every one of us was stretched and grew through serving there.

Tomorrow: a recap of the other ministry sites we served at.

Posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 3:13 pm in church life, latest in my life, travel | rss feed for comments| Leave a response, or trackback