Our Youth Mission Team will be serving in the Appalachian Mountains in southeastern Kentucky, July 24-30. During our time in Kentucky, our team will be doing home repair for families in need in the community. We will also be staying in tents each night. Please pray for the 20 students and 5 adults who will be serving. Check back here each day to see pictures and updates from the trip.
Check out all of the pictures from our trip here.
Our Youth Mission Team is off and running. Prayers for a great week serving in southeastern Kentucky.
Our team took a break from our van ride and stopped to hike at Shenandoah National Park.
Our home for the week was a campground in Daniel Boone National Forest. Team members were split into work teams and took turns preparing breakfast and dinner each day at camp and leading worship each night. We slept in tents and spent time swimming at the lake, playing lawn games with our campground host, and hanging around the beautiful campground.
Our group was split into two separate teams that completed different home repair projects during the week. Each day a different student at each of the work sites was given responsibility to be the site leader for the day. The site leader met with the Adventure Serve leader for our project to go over the plans and assign tasks for the rest of the team members for the day.
During the week, team members shared words of encouragement with each other at our "Mountain Mail" station.
Each morning we traveled to different scenic locations for Seed Thoughts, which was a time to share and reflect and spend time in quiet devotion and scripture reading.
Each evening, student teams were responsible for planning and leading worship. They led prayer, performed skits, led praise songs, and shared a Bible devotion. One night we had a special treat of having worship in a cave.
At our worksites each day, sometimes the adult leaders would help instruct and then step back and let the students take over. It was a real learning experience for both the students and the leaders as we worked through various challenges of the day from bruised thumbs to recutting wood, but it all started to come together as the team grew closer.
During the time that we spent working on our projects, we also got to to spend time with the homeowners and the families and hear their stories. At our roof repair site, the homeowner shared with us about how she had waited 9 years for her deteriorating and leaky roof to be fixed and how even though she had moments of doubt that it would ever be fixed, she never lost her faith in God.
Although our work teams did not get to finish their projects because of so much rain, it did not dampen their spirits as both teams made the most of the rain.
After a long week of work and fun, we packed up camp and traveled back to Wilmore to the Asbury Challenge Course for our final adventure of the trip. All week long, our team was challenged to seek ways to go from Green (our easy comfort zone) or Red (our fearful zone) to the yellow zone. For our low and high ropes adventure, many of our team members had to overcome a lot of fears to gather the courage to complete the courses.
It was a great week filled with lots of highs as our group laughed and played together, faced obstacles at the worksites, and it was filled with lots of lows as we faced a variety of setbacks on the job, culminating with the biggest obstacle of the week...the rain of course. Even though our students were stretched, they did not quit even in the face of a down pouring rain and were able to show the love of Christ through the homes that were repaired and the relationships that were built. It is our prayer that the lessons learned by the students this week will go with them during their teenage years and beyond. Thank you team for being the hands and feet of Jesus this week. We hope to see you next year.