Norfolk Team Update - Day 2 - 7.24.15

The Norfolk team rose this morning with an excited energy that permeated everything we did today! After breakfast, the team loaded up the vehicles and headed to Union Missions Ministries.  Union Missions is a local homeless shelter where they feed, clothe and house around 350 men and 120 women and children a day.  While there, people get a chance to meet with case workers who help them devise a plan to get them off the streets and back on their feet.  The team met with Miss Linda, one of the staff members, who gave us an introduction into homelessness and the goal of Union Missions.  After talking with the team and answering questions we had about the work that they do, we took a tour of the facility.  The team followed the path of the donations that we brought down, from the drop off point to the warehouse, where they sort all of the donation items and send them to the distribution rooms.  Finally, the thrift store that the Mission runs to help not only the homeless but also those in the area that may have homes, but are financially overwhelmed.  It was great to see our team engage with the workers at Union Missions and also feel compassion for those that have much greater physical needs than we do.

Afterwards, the team left to go to a park near our next stop, Consulate Health Center, where we ate lunch before heading over to Consulate.  Once we arrived at Consulate we met the group of elderly men and women who were waiting for us in another nearby park for a picnic.  It was awesome to see the reactions of both the group from Consulate and our own team as we walked up to the pavilion to cheers from the elderly.  Our team jumped at the opportunity to engage with them.  After the picnic, our team helped our new friends back to the health center across the street.  It was such a vision of God working in and through our group as the team helped those that could walk and those in wheel chairs safely get back to their rooms.  One of the workers at Consulate commented once we had gotten everyone back that we had saved them at least an hour and a half of transportation time.  We said goodbye to our new friends at Consulate and headed to the beach for a few hours of fun and an oceanside dinner.

After dinner, the team headed back to Spring Branch for Porch Time where they had an opportunity to recount some of the days events before listening to a talk from Nick.  Tonight Nick talked about faith and why our faith seems to make more sense when we leave our comfort zone.  He spoke from John 11, where Martha gets uncomfortable when Jesus asks her to move the stone from Lazarus' tomb.  He used the story to talk about the fact that God oftentimes asks us to get out of our comfort zone and trust that God will give us the strength and courage we need.  When we are willing to actually live out the things God is asking us to do then we get to experience the glory of God.  The team was challenged to actively look for how God shows up in our daily lives as we think about taking what we're learning on the trip and applying it in our daily routines.  After the talk, the team split into small groups to discuss this further and then headed to bed excited for out final day of serving tomorrow!

Norfolk Team Update - Night One - 7.23.15

The Norfolk team started their trip this afternoon by having a great trip down to VA Beach.  It was great to watch as the team immediately began to bond on our car ride down I-64.  There was no complaining about the traffic, but instead the extra time in the cars was used to play car games and have great conversations.  As a result, spirits were high as we made it to our housing site, Spring Branch Community Church, and settled into our home for the next two nights.  Spring Branch is led by Travis Simone's father Pastor Michael Simone, and we have had a wonderful partnership with them for many years.  One of our favorite things about the church is their youth room where they have a pool table, foosball table, and a brand new octagon ball court setup.  Octagon ball is a great game played in a walled arena where you attempt to hit the other players below the knee with a soft ball.  The whole team was super excited to see all the fun things Spring Branch has to offer.

After dinner and some free time playing games we began what was for most of the team their first ever "Porch Time." Porch Time comes from the Nicaragua trip where the teams would spend the evening on an actual porch and talk about where they had seen God at work during the day and we use the same title for all of the nightly meetings on every Student Ministry mission trip.  Tonight, Nick spoke from Matthew 25 where Jesus says that "whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me." He spoke about the idea that we can look around us and see God at work in the situations that God has placed us in and in the people around us as well.  The team was challenged to look for God at work tomorrow as we engage and serve the people God has placed in our paths. After Porch Time, the team split up into small groups and continued the conversation about how we can see Jesus at work on the trip and in our daily lives at home.  After small groups, the Norfolk headed to bed excited for the opportunity to serve tomorrow!

Norfolk Mission Team Departure Details

We are planning to leave at 5pm from the Chapel.  We will start checking everyone in at 4pm in the Student Ministry Worship Room.  Your kids don't need to pack a meal because we will eat pizza as soon as we arrive at our housing location in VA Beach tonight.

Feel free to text or call Luke Kincaid at 757-570-0292 or Nick Mercer at 757-345-1816 if you have any last minute questions.

Final Senior Experience Training Meeting

Last night we had our final training meeting for the Senior Experience. If you have any questions about the trip, please see the Checklist below or contact Alexis at akincaid@wcchapel.org.

The trip begins this Sunday, July 19th at 3pm. Please meet in the Student Ministries Lounge with all your stuff for the trip at that time.

Senior Checklist #3

Final Norfolk Team Meeting Info - 7.14.15

Thanks everyone for coming out to our final Norfolk Meeting! In our meeting we held a competition where the kids split into groups and were asked to create a unique game out of three random objects of their choosing. It is amazing what Middle School Students can do when they are given the opportunity to use their creativity! This task was to get them to think creatively about entertaining people as we have opportunities on the trip for this. After the competition, Nick gave the third and final Moses teaching that focuses on excuses that Moses makes when God calls him to action.  In small groups the students talked about some of the excuses that we can sometimes make when God calls us to His plan for our lives.
Here are the questions the kids looked at in their small groups
SG questions #3

Just in case you still need any of the forms/handouts: 
Packing List
Parental Consent Form
Norfolk General Schedule

If you have any other questions leading up to the trip please contact Nick at nmercer@wcchapel.org 
We are excited for the opportunity to serve with this team and can't wait for next week!

Nashville Team Update – Friday, July 10, 2015

What a great way to end our week in Nashville . . .

Serving Group 1:

For their final morning in the city, Serving Group 1 once again returned to the Andrew Jackson Boys & Girls Club to help with their summer camp and play with the kids. The team was surprised to see how quickly they formed bonds with these children and how quickly it became challenging to say goodbye for the last time. In the afternoon, Group 1 spent time at Open Table Nashville, an interfaith organization that journeys with the marginalized and provides education about issues of homelessness. They spent their time at a local Baptist church, helping them prepare to house 18 homeless men and women that evening by setting up and making beds, cleaning the fellowship area, and setting up tables for dinner. After their time of service was over, the group headed out for a sweet snack before returning to the housing site to pack, clean, and get ready for dinner.

Serving Group 2:

Serving Group 2 began their day with one more trip to Y-CAP to assist with the summer camp there. Similar to Group 1, Group 2 also found it bittersweet to hug the children goodbye today. What encouraged the group was knowing that the staff and future volunteers will continue to provide love and support to these energetic kids. After lunch, Group 2 returned to Nashville CARES, Tennessee’s leading community-based AIDS service organization. Whiles at CARES, the team packaged meals for clients who are suffering from this awful disease. Other members of the group did some grounds-keeping around the facility, while still other team members assisted with some filing. The staff was very impressed by the amount that Serving Group 2 was able to accomplish in just an afternoon.

Serving Group 3:

Meanwhile, Serving Group 3 spent the entire day at FAM. They participated in sidewalk Sunday school and then helped set up for the camp water day. They shared a meal with the students cooked by the staff chef, who also happens to be one of the main pastors! After lunch, they played water and field games with the children. They set up pools and slip ‘n’ slides, while some of the children enjoyed basketball as well. The team explained their time today as one of the most fun experiences of the trip. Overall, they loved finishing up their week with FAM and the friendships they built with the children throughout the entire week!

Serving Group 4:

After getting to sleep in a little bit this morning, Serving Group 4 headed to Fifty Forward, a senior citizens day care center that other groups had the privilege to also visit earlier in the week. The team spent time talking with the elderly, asking questions about their lives and sharing stories from their own. After eating lunch with the clients there, the group also enjoyed a nice music session, complete with piano playing and singing. After saying their goodbyes, Group 4 drove to meet up with Serving Group 5 at Catholic Charities Refugee Training Center. Catholic Charities is a national organization focused on efforts to reduce poverty, support families, and empower communities. Groups 4 and 5 helped out by sorting and organizing donations that would soon go to support refugee families and children.

Serving Group 5:

Project Transformation, Serving Group 5’s anchor site for the week, is closed on Fridays, so the team participated in “Operation Hydration” this morning. The team walked around downtown Nashville handing out water bottles to homeless people in the community, as well as police officers. After they ran out of water bottles, they ran through fountains and played with some local children. The entire team agreed that this experience was their favorite of the trip. It was such a joy to see the students serving others even outside of their scheduled ministry activities. After lunch in a local park, they joined up with group 4 to help sort and organize donations at Catholic Charities.

After each group had finished their serving opportunities for the day, the entire team met back at the housing site to clean and pack before embarking on our “free night” activity. To celebrate our last evening in Nashville, everyone got dressed in western gear (or t-shirts the groups had purchased at Walmart), and all groups headed to a famous, family-friendly restaurant downtown to enjoy a BBQ buffet and some country line dancing lessons. The team bonding experience was the perfect way to end such a great week of service and unity.

Tomorrow, the team plans to depart the housing site around 8am (9am EST) to return to Williamsburg. We will do our best to make good time, but we humbly solicit your prayers and patience as we prioritize safety and healthy bladders. With a team of 62 people, frequent stops are difficult to avoid. Again, please pray for safe travels, no traffic, and great group bonding time in the vehicles. This will be our final blog post for the trip, so to get on the text list to receive updates on our travels, please text NASHPARENT to 41411. We are excited to get home to share with you in person all that God has done in us and through us.

NC Team - Day 5 - 7.10.15

Today was the final day at our work site for the NC team.  However, similar to yesterday, the 7th grade girls spent the morning at the local Manna Food bank where they sorted food as well as stacked packages of diapers that will be distributed to families in need.  The girls loved getting to serve alongside each other and it was neat to watch the team of girls work diligently to sort things for people they will probably never meet.  They came back from Manna with stories of all the things they stacked and were excited to tell everyone how much they had done.

While the 7th grade girls were gone the rest of the team continued our project at Miriam's house.  We were able to finish our final trench after only a couple hours in the morning.  Then we quickly began digging the trenches to connect all the pipes, finishing the supply line trench, and attaching all the pipes together.  It was truly special to see the God-given joy on everyones faces as we threw the last shovel of dirt on to the trenches.  We wholeheartedly realized that only God could have inspired and strengthened our group to dig for 4 days!

While the digging was being finished up, some of our team continued to paint Miriam's house.  All of the trim needed to be painted beige and all of the siding needed to be painted blue.  Some of our team was on ladders to reach the higher spots, some of our team was walking around the bottom making sure every spot was covered with blue paint, and some of our team was painting the shutters.  At the end of the week we were able to not only finish priming her house, but also finish putting a first coat of colored paint on her entire house.  Miriam's neighbors and family were all astonished by the transformation, which was great to see how God used our team to impact an entire neighborhood.

After all of our work, Miriam and her daughter-in-law came out to thank all of us.  In addition to some very heartfelt words of gratitude they gave us a laminated piece of paper that has notes from all the family members and pictures of everyone in the family.  Here is what the family wrote to our team:

       We are overwhelmed at the outpouring of love and generosity you have given to our family.  Just               when you reach the very end and doubt if God even hears your prayers, 70 people show up at your home with their arms stretched open wide.  Thank you for bringing Romans 8:28 to life for us because it is clear that ALL things work together for good...even a broken down septic tank!
                  Forever your friends in Christ,
                    The Porter Family

It has been a blessing for our team to be able to serve and share Christ's love with the Porter family!

The team headed back to our housing site after finishing up our work project.  We cleaned up, ate dinner and then joined the ReCreation staff for some evening worship music and a highlight video from the week.  We enjoyed getting to see pictures from all the work we did and remembering all that God had done throughout the week.

Finally, our team gathered out back around a fire pit for our final porch time together.  We sang some more worship songs and then Luke closed out our time by re-visiting the story of Moses that we studied in our pre-trip training meetings.  He reminded us of the excuses that Moses made for why God shouldn't use him to free the Israelites from slavery in Exodus 4.  Then he transitioned that into reminding the team that we need to stop making excuses in our own lives for why we aren't willing to follow what God is asking us to do.  Then he closed by reminding the team that God is with us and will provide for us whenever He asks us to do something.  After Luke's talk everyone was given the opportunity to burn up the excuses they had written down on their card at the missions overnight and they were given a holding cross with Exodus 4:2 engraved on one side and the phrase No Excuses engraved on the other.  The hope is that we will all return to Williamsburg with these lessons in our minds and a cross to remind us whenever we begin to make excuses for not following God.

The evening ended with a final time in small groups to finish processing the trip.  It truly has been an extraordinary week where God did great things in and through everyone on the trip.  Thank you for all your prayers and don't forget to join us on August 2nd at 6:30pm at the Chapel to hear more stories and see a highlight video of the trip.