BSM

today was the final day of our qca mission trip.  everyone got up at 7 and had breakfast and then the guys went to King’s Harvest to serve breakfast and hand out groceries.  it was pretty intense for them.  they served 216 people.  while they were out in the morning, the girls and I stayed out at the church and cleaned.  after cleaning, the girls headed out to Christian Friendliness.

Christian Friendliness is a ministry outreach for young girls.  our girls spent time hanging out with the girls that came for the activities.  some played games with them and some made crafts, but everyone had a good time.  the young girls clung to our girls and it was awesome for our girls to see how much these little girls just wanted attention and affection.  now, it was an experience getting there.  the directions were not thorough and we got lost a couple of times.  it was frustrating, but we made it and were only 30 minutes late.  after dropping off the girls, i went back to bettendorf to pick up pizza while hannah stayed with the girls in Moline.  

so i picked up pizza and got that started and when john and the guys got back from King’s Harvest, john took his car over to moline to pick up the girls.  once back, we enjoyed some pizza together and then took some time to debrief the week and what happened.

it was awesome to hear some of the stories and interactions and experiences that our students had this week, that have impacted their lives.  a lot of them felt convicted about so many people being in need in our own area, and they haven’t been taking the time to help out.  and through the skate ministry, we interacted with kids who need to hear about Jesus and it was awesome to see our students move out of their comfort zones and hand out gatorades to the kids at the skatepark and talk to them.  one of the other highlight experiences of the week was the group that was able to go to some fast food places and pay for random people’s food.  some people were resistant and asking “what’s the catch?” or “why do you want to do this?”  these questions provided awesome opportunity for us to be real and tell them why we were doing it and it’s all because we love Jesus and we wanted to reach out and show God’s love.  when some were resistant, our students would say something like, “when’s the next time someone’s going to offer to pay for your food?”  people were quick to let them buy after that realization.  during the week, the students were opened to ways they can serve our city and were convicted to take on that challenge to be active within our city and point to God within the city.

the goal… to love our city.  to serve our city.  to share God with our city.  in the bible, Nehemiah had such a passion for his hometown of Jerusalem, that his heart broke for the city and all he wanted to do was go back and rebuild the city.  this passion and heartache drove Nehemiah to do some amazing things.  read his story in the book of Nehemiah and see what it looks like to have a passion for your city and understand what extremes Nehemiah went to to serve his city.  

it’s my hope, that we as Christians claim our city and go to every extreme to point God out to the people in our city.  the Christians should be a city within the city.  we need to live in community and everything we say and do needs to point to God. let’s be the city within the Quad Cities, that points to the God of the city.

thanks for checking this out while on this trip.  please subscribe to our blog so you can get updates when new blog posts are written, and please drop us a comment.  thanks so much!

-bryan

day two is nearly complete and i will be hitting my mattress head first upon completion of this post.

all three of our groups started out this morning going to the Lydia Home again.  it was the last day to help out there.  while there, we did more yard work for some area families, painted for the Lydia Home, and also did some weeding for them.  we were going to go back to Dorothy’s and put some brick in for her to border her flower bed, but she was unable to find the brick she wanted.  so she pointed us to a house to help by doing some yard work for them.

early afternoon, a group left to go serve lunch at King’s Harvest.  they had some cool experiences.  they enjoyed it more than the Salvation Army experience.  the people that they served at King’s Harvest were homeless and lined up outside where the food was being served, where as the people that were served at Salvation Army actually were staying there.  

after King’s Harvest, that group took some cash and went out and just gave to people.  they went to the Srub n’ Pub on state street and paid for some people’s laundry and helped people take it out to their car.  they went to McDonald’s and just started paying for people’s meals.  when they paid for someone’s meal they would give them a little card with our mission trip phrase “Love God + Others” and on the back of the card would be our  website.  in McDonald’s they ran into some guys who responded to receiving a card by asking “can I have your number with that?”  to which our girls quickly responded “NO.”  but he said he may show up at one of our events.  if anything can get a guy to come to church, it’s a girl!  as they were driving around, they saw a construction crew.  so they went and bought some cold sodas and went back and gave them t the construction workers who were excited for the treat.  overall, I think they handed out about 150 cards with our info on it.  it’s so exciting and inspiring to see our students get so pumped about doing things like this.  this was the highlight for this group so far for the week.

one of the other groups went to check out the house we will be painting in the next couple of days.  there was a guy that showed up to show them how to set up and move the scaffolding.  they then went to LeClaire Park to pray for the aug. 8th ‘Rock the River’ event.  LeClaire Park is the site for the event and we felt it would be awesome to pray for the location at the location now.  they then went to Salvation Army to prep and serve dinner.

the last group, my group, went to ‘Hand in Hand’ today.  a good portion of the kids there have some sort of disability.  some are down-syndrome and some just have really bad temper issues. jacob and i spent the time outside with the preschool kids playing in the sand box.  at first they were pretty shy and resistant to us, but soon warmed up to us and started playing with us.  we buried feet in the sand and built really janky sand castles only to be destroyed by toddlers.  a couple of brothers that were there were awesome.  one loved shovels and he would go around stealing shovels from everyone else and then yell out how many shovels he had.  ”I hav thfree shovels!”  he got pretty excited.  his brother got a real kick out of covering himself in sand.  i also convinced him that there was buried treasure in the sandbox, so he responded by equipping both hands with shovels and commenced digging immediately.  i’m pretty sure he’ll show up tomorrow and continue the excavation project.  the girls went into the baby part of the day care and seemed to have a blast playing with the babies.  i made it in there after all the preschool kids had been picked up and one of the girls saw her dad coming into the building through the window and responded by almost shattering the window out of mere excitement.  her little sister was quite fond of a giraffe toy which she usually had in her mouth at all times.

we then returned for dinner where Hannah’s crew made everyone a delicious meal of spaghetti with meat sauce, salad, and garlic bread w/ cheese.  after dinner we once again made our daily commute to the ymca to cleanse ourselves from the nastiness of the day.

after dinner, we enjoyed some fancy guitar playing and singing.  the hit of the night was Love Story, the one about Romeo and Juliet that streams across radio stations and itunes everywhere.  

we then had a good time exchanging stories and experiences and talking about God moving through the things we are doing.  it’s so awesome to see what’s happening.  what i mean is… when you go off to a mission trip that is normally away from your community, you serve for a short while and while you are there you have somewhat of a short experience there and the responses and the reactions of that service time, drift away after a short while.  sure you may have done something huge for someone’s life at the moment, but once you get back, the impact that it’s had on your life somewhat tends to fade away with the surroundings that were there that are now replaced by routine, comfort, and normality.  here we are, serving in our city, impacting the people that we live in community with.  people who receive cards from us or simply see students working and wearing our tshirts with Bettendorf Student Ministry on the back, can look at that and identify us in the community of this city.  hopefully what we are doing is creating an identity for Jesus in our community that is also reflecting our identity as a local group of students who love Jesus.  what we are doing has potential to leave a lasting impression on people here that will hopefully have more interaction with us simply because we are neighbors and live in the same city.

before going to bed, i must leave you with a final pic of a friend we made.  his life was over before we even met him, but his memory will live in infamy.  here’s to you, Sparky the Squirrel.  good night everyone, talk to ya tomorrow.