I will get back to my normal blogging after this week but for now I want to give you a mission trip update.
The combined youth groups hit the road yesterday morning to head to a local nursing home. They helped with bingo and went room to room visiting with senior citizens who normally don’t have many guests. I was happy to hear one of our 11 year old say to me last night that visiting with a couple older ladies was one of the favorite things she has ever done. She shared her story with me about their challenges and how much they enjoyed the kids coming to visit.
After a small stop by the church for lunch, the kid’s did their most daring act yet. Something that has been very important to us as a church is offering prayer to people in our lives. As I talked to the youth pastor from Methodist Temple at the beginning of the week, we decided to send the kids out for a couple hours offering prayer to people within our community. This takes some courage!
They did hit some bumps including being asked to leave the local mall, a lady at Meijer’s told them her son was a youth pastor and he would never do what they were doing. Actually, I think she told them it was against the law. Surprisingly, they were best received at WalMart (not my favorite place).
The great news is they had several who were touched and thankful for them coming up and respectfully asking if they needed prayer. One young lady at Meijer’s really opened up and told the youth that her sister was in the hospital and really needed prayer and they prayed together. At the mall, a mother of two was having a very bad day and she was approached by two different prayer teams at two different times and accepted prayers from both teams. She really needed someone to reach out to her.
The Marion Star (our local newspaper) decided to do a story about our week and they came out this morning to interview us. It was neat to see how taken the reporter was about the Need Prayer? heart and focused a lot of his questions on this aspect of our missions. The final story will be in Saturday’s paper so it will be interesting to see what he writes.
Last night, the Indiana group put on a special service for our church complete with music, a message, drama, sign language and more! It was a great night. I still think my favorite part was afterwards as we hung out. If you have not been to our church, it’s more of a camp layout than a normal church building so there’s a lot of place to relax and visit outside. So, while enjoying the cool summer breeze and an occasional visit by a mosquito, it was just nice to kick back and visit.
Today they are doing touch up work at the church and Sebastian’s House. Tomorrow is Cedar Point which I don’t think I’m going to make. For now, here’s some more pics….
More pics at www.tomhypes.com
