This June 14-19, we were able to go on a mission trip as sponsors with the SYF. Madison, as a youth, also went. Ellie was left behind to her own fun adventures – hanging out with friends, spending time with Grandma and Grandpa, tubing with friends, volleyball workouts, and helping out around the house. She was having so much fun, she hardly missed us … and we said that was okay.
We left around 10 on Sunday morning in four vans which earned the “call names” for the walkie-talkies of White Lightning, Red Rover, Fishbowl, and Glacier.
We took a lunch break at Buccees, but headed to a local park to enjoy nature while we ate our food and stretched our legs.
We got to our host church on the north side of Indy around 4:15pm, unloaded our bags, inflated our air mattresses, and explored our new home. Some of the girls worked at weeding the church’s playground just to be kind.
We went with the organization, Youth Works, which did a fabulous job. They have partnerships with a lot of non-profits in the Indianapolis area they work with during the 8 weeks of summer when youth are coming and going on a weekly basis. There are college-aged to young adults who host the groups – set things up on site, help prep for meals, organize worship, troubleshoot during the week, and make things work. They also go over/have a ton of “keep you safe” rules they go over every day and have to adhere to certain protocol to keep things standardized since they have sites nationwide. But it made for a week that, as sponsors, we could enjoy – not planning, organizing, etc, just following directions, keeping people safe, and serving with our youth. There were also two other youth groups serving the same week we were. One was from North Dakota, and the other was from Michigan. Many of our youth made good friends with them during the week.
Every day, was pretty much arranged the same:
Breakfast – prepared by one of the youth groups – and Pack Your Lunch
Personal devotional time
Work sites (usually about a 30 minute drive) – thrift stores, food banks, food distribution centers, community gardens, kids club – picking up trash, weeding, planting, sorting, packaging, hauling, moving, sweeping, talking, helping, shopping, connecting.
Things I want to remember: evidence of home alongside parking lots, the man who purposefully dropped trash and my response, the homeless youth center across the street we didn’t work at, the re-entry program; Donna who sorted clothes with us, Hailey who kept us working at St. Vincent de Paul but “wasn’t religious”; shopping with individual customers and hearing the story of a husband lost, a house lost, and a life changed; working where I could give UNLIMITED bread and hear which bread people like for French toast, what they can use it for, the number of grandbabies one helps care for, the energy and quick knee dip of an 80-year-old vibrant woman, and the racks and racks of bread that was otherwise discarded from Kroger
Community Activity – Monument Circle and downtown shops, Lip Sync battle (a back up plan due to weather), Sculpture Garden, and NCAA Hall of Champions.
Things I want to remember: meeting Mark while waving at an arriving group and playing ping pong with him, getting a young boy watching to join in on ping pong with us and him inviting his friend, listening as Mark encouraged the two kids he didn’t know and seeing him later teach them to play chess; handing out leftover pizza to some guys walking through the alleyway with hamburgers from a food truck – maybe from “Thy Kingdom Crumb” food truck that Shawn’s group ate at and is a ministry of a NFL football player; my own awkwardness at the lip sync performance, but how the groups all really embraced it.
Dinner – prepared by the Youth Works volunteers and Clean up the church
Worship and Group Devotions / or Showers at the local YMCA (it was a toss up which would happen first)
Bed around 10:30.
On Thursday night, we had a foot washing service. I washed the feet of the girls in my group and in Jeremy’s group. Jeremy washed the feet of the guys in his group. We also prayed an individual prayer for each of them after washing their feet. It was a Holy Spirit filled moment. It led to tears, sharing, hugs, and bonds.
There were sweet farewells and final pictures before we headed home on Friday morning. We stopped at Young’s Dairy for lunch.
