Fold Day 4

Fold Day 4

I’ve learned more about the life of a teenager over these four days than I have in five years of youth ministry.  Perhaps it’s just taken me these years to be able to see and understand their nuances and habits.  Regardless, this trip has given me a window into the needs, fears, and desires of our junior highers. 

After posting the blog from yesterday, I joined the team outside at a camp fire.  Dave has more experience with junior highers than three of me, and it shows.  He can have fun, play along, and match them in just about everything.  He’s awesome.

This morning, rain kept us from finishing the staining of the school building.  Instead we divided our team into three groups to complete projects around camp—weed a flower bed, paint trim under a porch, and add crushed stone to a walkway.  It was a chilly morning for everyone in the rain.  Again, I’m impressed with how little grumbling there is.  This is an attitude that I know can persist after the mission trip is over. 

In the afternoon, our team travelled a few miles away to the boys’ house.  The Fold has a few different properties.  The school, office, and place we’re staying at is on one property, the boy’s home is on another, and I believe the girls’ is on yet another (though I haven’t seen it.)  Our job at the boys’ home was to gather brush and felled limbs and build the fire big enough to allude to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.  We succeeded.  We also got an opportunity to meet the house parents for the boys in residency and the boys themselves.

I’m pushing a few youth to provide some blog insights, so there may be more updates later tonight.  Here’s how you can pray for us:  The novelty of being on a mission trip has worn off.  It’s around this time that tempers have worn thin, frustrations have mounted, and the temptation to curl up into a selfish ball of irritability flares up.  Pray at those moments we would looked to Christ and the cross to be reminded of the grace shown us and have it melt our hearts in praise to God and love for others.  It’s a big prayer request.  Pray that God would do it.