The Mission Week So Far

Today brought us to Day 3 of our local mission week.

By way of background, three years ago and again two years ago, a large group of Saint Matthew youth and a few adults, including me, participated in Group Workcamps mission trip weeks, in Grand Rapids, Michigan and Nashville, Tennessee. As had been true of a mission trip I took with youth and adults from a congregation I previously served, we had great experiences on both of those trips, working with folks from other congregation (of varying denominations) working with places like community centers, thrift shops, Christian education programs, senior centers, and so on. We cleaned, planted, weeded, mulched, sorted, built, painted, and so on.

Last year, we decided that we would "go local" and do our own local mission "trip" in our home area of Logan and Hocking County. It went so well that we opted to do it again this year.

The reason we undertake mission weeks--or many of the other things we do to share God's love in practical ways with others--is pure and simple: Jesus has told us to! We remind ourselves of this throughout the week. Biblical passages we've looked at on the first three mornings of this year's mission have reminded us of this:

• In Acts 1:6-8, the risen Jesus, just before going to heaven, told His disciples to share the Good News that all can have new and everlasting life with God when they turn from sin and believe in Him. As followers of Jesus, we're to share this wonderful news in both word and deed in our own communities and in the whole world. We do this through our mission weeks.
• Acts 2:44-46 finds the first Christians not only being outwardly focused toward the world, serving and loving others outside the Christian family, but also looking out for others within the Christian family. We do this through our mission weeks, when we undertake projects for some folks from within out own Saint Matthew congregation.
• Ephesians 2:8-9 tells us that we aren't saved by the kinds of good works we do during our mission weeks. We are saved from sin and death by Christ's death and resurrection and our faith in Jesus. But, James 2:14-17, reminds us that if you have become one of God's people through Christ, then you will undertake good works as a way of thanking God and loving God back.

Here's this year's mission week schedule for Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. We...

• meet at 8:00 for breakfast, devotions, and prayer (the devotions remind us of why we serve)
• split into two crews to take on two projects at the same time
• have a lunch provided for us by wonderful folks or fix our own from lunch meats we have on hand
• do more work
• finish up at 3:30

Among the projects we've taken on this year

• scraping and painting a porch
• weeding flower beds
• weeding and mulching at a local public park
• volunteering at a food pantry
• made logs 

There will be more projects over the next few days.

We've been blessed with the help, supervision, transportation, and food provided by adult members of the congregation.

The youth who have participated have, once more this year, dug in and worked hard and had fun together!

I love the way the mission week brings youth and adults together.

Today, we put a little bit of fun and a great additional service project into the week's mix. We met at the church building at 7:45, then drove to Columbus, about an hour away.

In the morning, we toured the American Whistle Corporation's small manufacturing facility. This company is the only manufacturer of metal whistles in the United States. The ten employees churn out tens of thousands of whistles every year. This was interesting and the tour guide made it lots of fun. (I got the idea for doing this after seeing the tour featured on Ohio News Network. American Whistle Corporation's manufacturing process has also been profiled on the Discovery Channel.)

After the tour, we went to Tommy's Pizza's East Lane Avenue location, across from the campus of The Ohio State University. Although my pizza-eating days are largely over (except for the occasional half-slice of the real stuff or individual servings of the healthy stuff), Tommy's remains my favorite pizza on the planet. And while Martha and I ate our salads and many dove into subs, I think the rest of the group enjoyed their pizza. Before eating, the sixteen of us joined in praying a common Lutheran table grace:

Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest and let these gifts to us be blessed. Amen

We had six youth, three children, and seven adults for our foray to Columbus and, after lunch, we went to the Lutheran Social Services food pantry on Champion Avenue on Columbus's south side. This is an impressive operation.

People needing food evidently screened into the process when they arrive at the pantry.

Volunteers then meet these folks with shopping carts and proceed to help to bag items from categories like grains, proteins, meats, vegetables, breads, greens, and fruits.

What I love about the process is that, for the recipients of the food, it's more like going shopping than it is sticking out their hands. That diminishes any threat to their dignity.

I also love the interaction with the clients the process gave to volunteers like us. It was fun talking about various foods and different ways of preparing them with folks as we moved from aisle to aisle with shopping carts today.

Most of our folks were involved in dealing with the recipients directly in this way. But some of our young people were drafted to bring food items upstairs from a basement storage area, replenishing supplies on the main floor. This was really needed, as some of the LSS staff told us that today brought an unusually large number of folks to the pantry today.

There were a number of volunteers from Bank of America too. They appeared to be working really hard.

I was unable to snap pictures at either the American Whistle Corporation or at the food pantry. I took some pictures and videos on the Monday and Tuesday of our mission week. I'll hopefully post those later.

In no particular order, I want to thank the following folks for their hard work with the mission week so far:
Kayla
Isaac D. (aka: Critter)
Jacob
Stephen
Laikyn
Kirsten
Lori E.
Mike M.
Jim V.
Jim K.
Dick B.
Martha S.
Bob and Carolyn
Martha
Sarah G.
Isaac G.
Megan G.
Debbie K.
Cameron
Nancy
Jim F.
Tony (aka: Chuck!)

We're also thankful to all who have donated items and money. I'm especially grateful to all who are praying that God will keep us safe, teach us to serve in Christ's Name, and have fun. (I hope that I haven't forgotten anyone!)

More volunteer names will be added as we come into the last two days of the mission, which will include a Friday night sleep deprivation...er, lock-in.

What's Goin' On?

With that Marvin Gaye title, I give an explanation for my absence from here of late.

At the conclusion of the mission trip in Canandaigua, NY, with Group Work Camps, I got home one week ago.

On Tuesday, my wife and I flew to Florida to spend time with our daughter and her husband. It was a wonderful visit!

Yesterday, our daughter's boss, seeing that she was distraught from having said goodbye to us at breakfast and knowing that we wouldn't take off until 7PM, told our daughter to take the day off. That was a gift!

Among the most special of memories I'll take from this short foray to Florida was late-night ice cream with our daughter. (My wife is an early-to-bed, early-to-rise person.) The best memories and the best experiences always seem to happen in the supposedly mundane and inconsequential encounters we have with those we love. The old saying is absolutely true: Love is spelled T-I-M-E.

Our daughter seems to be doing very well with her new job and appears to have the respect of her bosses. She's a on a track for management, which is exciting. Given her childlike enthusiasm and love of people, that doesn't surprise me.

My wife and I also got some "just the two of us time" and that too, was fantastic. Whenever we get to do that, we remember again how much we love and value one another. That's good for a couple soon to be married thirty-three years to remember!

The only down part of the trip was a group of loud, inebriated fellow passengers on the return flight. Particularly annoying were a man and a woman who spoke so loudly that I'm sure that two-thirds of the passengers heard their every word. They'd met at the airport lounge and gotten pretty loaded even before we boarded. She was married; he wasn't. His subtle spiel included several expressions of regret that the woman was married. She indicated that that didn't really matter to her and toward the end of the flight, they exchanged telephone numbers...and planned to find a bar to which they could retire.

But as smarmy as their dialog was, it was their loudness and that of several of their fellow revelers that was most annoying. About three-quarters of the way through the flight, a man several rows behind me asked if the two "flirts" could keep it down.

They were quieter for a short time. But soon they were as loud as before, he with his booming and increasingly profanity-laced pronouncements and unsuccessful attempts at humor, she with a loud, penetrating cackle.

When the flight ended, we waited for awhile as an elderly man was escorted from the plane by paramedics. From my seat sixteen rows back, I saw the old man kiss the flight attendant in gratitude, his wife close at hand.

During that brief wait, the cackler smacked the shoulder of one reveler and asked, "Did you have a good time?" Several people in the back replied instead: "None of us had a good time. You made it insufferable for the rest of us!" When the boomer tried to explain that he was celebrating a $300,000.00 sale he made earlier in the day, the crowd was unimpressed.

In all honesty, it's the first time I've ever encountered anything like that on a flight. My feeling is that the attendant who might otherwise have cut off the annoying group, was too busy with the special needs of the elderly man up front to note what was going on in aisles fourteen and fifteen.

A highlight of the entire trip, including the flight, was time spent reading Philip Yancey's fantastic new book on prayer. I'm sure that I'll be writing more about this in the future.

My wife, daughter, and I also had the chance to look up and briefly visit with a Lutheran pastor with whom I've corresponded and had phone chats. He's every bit as nice in person as he is from a distance!

So, have you read Yancey's book?

Have you dealt with long distances from your grown children?

Have you ever spent time on a commercial air flight with noisy drunks?

Tell me about those experiences, if you want.