We're back... now what?

Hey everyone, we've been back from our mission trip for a week now. I hope you are thinking about how the trip impacted your faith, how you met and served God in Minnesota and how you can continue spending time with God and serving him here in Michigan.

Every year Youthworks, through their magazine Reverb (you ALL got one as you left ....) lets us know about their 1K challenge to kickstart some service/community minded ministry in our area. I'd like to challenge you all to think about this seriously. Would you like to start a once a month lunch/sandwich ministry in Detroit? (We made a big impact in the few we handed out in June, we could make it a once a month bigger project, maybe even get more youth involved!) Would you like to start and run a community garden in the back of our church? (thoughts are already forming on this with some adults from the church) Is there something else you can think of?

Give it some thought... let me know, and I'll help you fill out the paperwork to submit to Youthworks/Reverb.

For more information on the 1K challenge, click here

We are back from Red Lake!!

What a week! It was brutal at times and oh so beautiful at other times! I learned so much and saw God doing such wonderful work through the greatest group of young adults I have ever had the pleasure of spending time with. I am sure we are all glad to be home enjoying family and the comforts of home, but we will all remember this mission and pray for those we served and served with this past week!

Our last day at Red Lake...

From Beth:
Working in kids club today was amazing. Josh & Paul, another teen from our crew (Wisdom Rocks!),  were leading the Bible story time. Yesterday was a little difficult because many of the kids didn't want to sit and listen to us talk. Today, however, many of the kids responded when we asked them questions and all of them were excited to help us do the review puzzle we made that said "Jesus ate with people like us!" It was so much fun to see how much the kids were enjoying themselves and so many of them wanted to be the one to put a word together. The best part was probably how happy the kids sounded when we read the phrase out loud together.
   All in all the day went smoothly and I'm looking forward to being able to use this experience when I help out in VBS next week back home!

From Angie:
We spent our morning today doing work projects at two locations. Seak was at the woman's shelter and Wisdom was at the senior care center. We spent a few hours working and then took our lunch break. After lunch it was back to kids club. I was impressed by our youth. YW runs the kids club similar to a VBS. but for each center, OUR youth made up the entire lesson, with very little help, and then ran their lesson. When Beth mentioned the puzzle they made - they actually came up with the idea and MADE the puzzle. Awesome. Dinner was a community cookout at the Mission church. However after having the threat of rain every day and never seeing a drop, we got rain, lots and lots of rain. Kudos to Mike for getting totally soaked bringing all the food back to the school so we could still have our community picnic. It was good to meet some of the parents of kids club kids and hear that the kids have been telling their parents about Jesus! Our club time tonight included the YW tradition of foot washing. It is very emotional as each of us has our feet washed and are then individually prayed over. Our youth kept up the Geneva tradition of washing the feet of the YW staff.  Then we had a fun bed time song which included Aladdin (ask Josh about that one!) we had a good week but are really excited to start heading home. :-)

Immersed in Red Lake

Hi Geneva Family from Dan!  Today we all got to experience Red Lake in every sense of the word.  Though we are on separate work teams, we all ended up working together today.  After a morning orientation from Jenna, we set off to work at kids club.  When I was here in 2005, kids club was in the elementary school,and the Youth Works staff had the entire building at their disposal.  This year, the elementary school said "no" to their building request.  As usual, the YW staff had to adapt on the fly.  On the reservation, there is an organization called "Boys and girls club".  This is a non-religious organization that works with children from ages 4-13(ish).  When YW asked them the unthinkable...."hey,would you let us come into your club, bring dozens of teens and their adult leaders, and run an 8 week program teaching who Jesus Christ is to the kids on the reservation?" .....they said "yes!"  Praise God for his mysterious ways!  So the entire Geneva team spent the day teaching scripture "then Jesus replied, 'I am the bread do life, He who comes tome will not go hungry, and he who believes in me will never thirst".  And we played games, and we did art projects, what a day!  After the club ended, we had to drive some of the kids home, which in itself was a trip! These kids wanted to milk every minute of  time with our kids, and purposely told us the wrong turns in order to prolong the ride home! They are precious children,though many of them have seen and experienced things no child should.  I was shocked and near tears when I dropped off Carl and his little sister to a trailer that had a sinking foundation, broken and boarded windows, no grass, mud everywhere, and it was worse inside.  I was once again reminded of how blessed we are,and how far we have left to go to get our world back to the order in which God intended it.  After a physically and emotionally draining day, it felt awesome to go swimming in beautiful Red Lake!  We drove to the beach and had about an hour to relax and swim.  I decided to swim out and down the lakeshore , and as I swam, I looked up and saw an eagle flying out over the water.  I had to stop swimming and just watch it fly.  It was so beautiful.  When I returned, I told the group what I had seen, and asked them to guess what bible verse I thought of when I saw the eagle flying.  It didn't take long for Jessica to say "Isaiah 40!"  Our group never ceases to amaze and bless me!  Thanks for all your prayers, we feel the power of your love here every day.  One more day with these wonderful children, and we will be homeward bound!   Peace and love,  Dan.

Tuesday at Red Lake......

From Josh:
     Today the Wisdom group went to the only church on the reservation for its work site. When we got there we split into two groups. The first headed upstairs and began painting a room. The second headed outside to begin moving things around to prepare for a garage sale. This involved moving lots of heavy objects, including furniture, from building to building. I spent my morning painting. It was hot and stuffy, but we pushed through. We had the entire room covered in one coat of paint by lunchtime! After lunch I switched over to to help move things around to get stuff for the garage sale ready. We had to move a room of heavy items into the gym and make it presentable for sale. It was very inspiring to see the incredible work ethic each and every person showed. Near the end we had to move a large couch. As we were trying to relocate this couch to the gym, we had a lot of difficulty getting it through two doorways. We were even forced to take a door off! However we persevered and got the couch where it needed to be. I cannot express how thrilling it is to see God all around us in so many ways!

From Angie:
    Breakfast today was waffles and sausage. It was prepared by the Seek group. That means some of us had to get up earlier than usual to make it. The rest of us appreciated it!
     After breakfast Wisdom group had to do building clean up - yep, we cleaned the bathrooms. I hope everyone appreciated that!
     After clean up time we have Devo time, aka devotional time. This is done alone, just each of us and God. Today's lesson included the "un" story. We talked with God  about how we see ourselves, and others, using "un" words - unworthy, unloved, un accepted, unhelpful, etc. but God doesn't see us that way at all. I like that, in addition to work, these mission trips include time to pray and time to praise God. Then we went to work.
   As Josh said we spent the day painting and moving heavy items. The Seak group joined us after lunch. None of the areas had air conditioning and like Michigan, it was in the 90s today. HOT! We really needed showers today.
     Dinner was pizza at a park in Bemidji (look it up on a map!) It was fun to play and be near Bemidji lake. Then we got Dairy Queen - yummy!
Well, time for lights out. Like Josh said, I have been amazed by the work ethic of all the teens here. God is amazing in how he is working in the lives of so many teens from different places in our country. Praise God!

Monday's activities with a note from Madelyn...

What a blessing Monday has been! We had our time with the spirit this morning. Everyone wanders off to a spot where they can have some alone time with Jesus. We were all given devotional guides to help us through the time but mostly it is your time to find your self and seek God's guidance. We then got our orientation on what our day would bring. It was painting for all. The Wisdom group (Angie, Beth, Bill, Josh, Tim, and I) were assigned to paint a poll barn storage building for the school we are staying in. The other half of Wisdom is made up of an adult leader and four high schoolers (3 girls and 1 boy) We will work with this great group of people tomorrow when we paint a few rooms at the only church on the reservation. The Seek group (Dan, Madelyn, Drew, Jessica, and Caitlin) were assigned to paint at the Kids Club building. The other half of their team is made up of an adult leader and five high schoolers. Both jobs were a challenge and had a few other odd jobs thrown in, but the connection our crew made with the others in the group was a true wonder for me to see!

From Madelyn Degener....
Group: Seek
Today we painted one of the walls in the boys and girls club. We finished way early and then had lunch while we waited for it to dry. After we painted the second coat, we went to help unload a truck at the church for a garage sale that they were having. Then we came back to the school we are staying  at and talked to the kids who were skating. Most of the kids here crave attention, because they come from broken or poor families. Some of the kids we talked to were only like 6 or 7 and they were swearing and throwing rocks at our van. It's really sad to see the situations that these little kids are being put into.
Then for showers, we all came into the school, and only about half the kids could get showers in before all of the water was in that section was shut off. We waited for like a half hour before we could go to the high school locker rooms - which are much nicer anyways and had individual stalls with water that had adjustable temperatures - and which was great after three days without a shower for a lot of us.

We closed tonight with the usual Club Time and then our own Church Group Time. Tonight Tim and Drew lead us in that discussion of our evening yesterday and our day today. So much great input from our kids. It is truly an honor to be with this group of young adults!!

Please continue to pray for us and keep us in your thoughts,
Yours in faith with Dan and Angie,
Mike.

Mike and Angies's crew....

We made it to Red Lake and all are well!! Our trip was awesome (I have a feeling I'm going to use that word a lot this week). We stopped yesterday and had a chance to put our toes into Lake Superior. Later, when we arrived and got settled at First Presbyterian Church in Marquette, we walked down to a park with a beach and almost everyone took a swim. Now you should know that the water temperature in Lake Superior is about 40 deg. We had pizza in the park and had lights out at 10:30. We left the church on time this morning and made our way to Red Lake.

First Day of Travel!

Saturday morning we picked up our 2 vans. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to reach the pedals, but I could!  After deciding tat we had to remove the back seats to fit our luggage, we packed up and were on the road around 10:00 AM.

The middle schoolers and high schoolers are traveling in separate cans. Jeff and I are with the middle schoolers. Almost right away, this group started playing games together. They played car games,(the alphabet game, pictionary telephone and mafia) the entire way!! Jeff and I thought we were going to have to be the instigators in getting the kids to talk with each other and interact, but we didn’t have to.

The high school van was a little quieter we hear, with reading, sleeping and small conversations…

Thanks to someone having to stop for a bathroom break, we stopped at a rest area that was right along Lake Michigan. Dan and I couldn’t resist getting our feet wet, so we all stopped for about ½ hour, walking through the water and getting refreshed. The water felt really good.

We made it to Marquette just before 7 P< and were welcomed by a member of the First Presbyterian Church with plates of homemade cookies! After being shown to our sleeping rooms, we went to a park on Lake Superior to swim. We were told the water was 41degrees, but that didn’t stop 16 people from going swimming! (3 of us were out getting pizza for the rest of the group.) We have a very brave and courageous group!

After staying in Marquette for the night, we left bright and early to head towards Duluth. We plan on eating lunch together, then the high schoolers will head towards Red Lake and the middle schoolers will stay in Duluth to start our week of mission!