more will be revealed

Yesterday I posted about our groups experience with the Vine Hill Boys & Girls Club. Today I wanted to share about our work serving at the other ministry sites in Nashville.

Monday afternoon my group served at Project C.U.R.E., a “non-profit, humanitarian relief organization that collects medical supplies and equipment and donates it to developing countries.” After a brief story from Greg Cox, the Operations Director at the Nashville collection and distribution center, we took a tour of the massive warehouse completely filled with medical equipment that will eventually be shipped off to a developing country. You can see from the picture below how large it is.

We spent our time at Project C.U.R.E. sorting and organizing, cleaning and wrapping various equipment for shipment, along with cleaning the bathrooms for the many volunteers that serve there. It was quite amazing to see how this organization is taking the excess and out-of-date equipment, things us wealthy Americans typically throw away, and then send this over to a developing country who desperately needs quality medical resources. Definitely read through the Project C.U.R.E. website to understand the scope of what they do. It’s quite amazing!

Tuesday morning my group went over to Community Care, an interesting lightpost placed in the middle of the projects. Community Cafe offers the homeless and poor a safe place where they can get a shower while their clothes get cleaned, a meal at breakfast or lunch, an address where they can get their mail, hygiene items, as well as counseling and prayer. I was quite impressed with how God is using this place.

Our group helped prepare the lunch as well as clean the pantry area, the buildings windows, and the grounds of litter. We helped serve lunch once that was done, and when everyone had gone through the line, we each grabbed some food and sat down with the guests. I’ll save my thoughts on my conversations with the homeless for another post later this week. Suffice it to say, they were challenging.

Wednesday afternoon was designated as our “Urban Exposure” where we would see a different side of the city, a side that the tourists typically don’t see. This afternoon deserves a bit more space than a simple recap, so I will focus on this part of our trip in a separate post.

Thursday morning was unexpectedly enjoyable as we served at Adult Day Services, a senior citizen day care right down the road from Vanderbilt University.  I had quite the time getting to know Wilbur and Joe as I sat between them and helped them play BINGO.  These two guys were the sweetest guys you could ever meet.  Though it took alot of concentration to understand what they were saying all the time!  Our time with these wonderful people went by so fast playing BINGO, after which we helped serve them lunch.  To cap it all off, Joe prayed for us when we left, which was quite touching.

We definitely got a good taste of the variety of ways one can serve and minister to the poor, the homeless, the elderly, and the forgotten through these various ministries.  Look for my thoughts on the urban exposure tomorrow.

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.

This next week I’ll be in Nashville, leading a mission trip.  We have a group of 16 going down from my church to do inner-city work.  We’re doing the trip through CSM, a great student mission organization that I’m excited to work with.  Look for an update next week.

All books written by John Piper are on sale at the Desiring God bookstore.  I’m not a huge Piper fan but I do enjoy reading him, and I think I’ll pick a couple up.  You should do the same!

Props to Big D. for the heads-up.

I decided to remove this video and link to it instead to avoid having it autoplay every time someone loads the blog.