 |
|||
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
All in all the trip was AMAZING. If Ryan and the first pres. crew will have us back again, we will gladly be there next year. We will talk about our trip at the 10am worship service on August 8th. Our students are truly amazing. God put us together in such an amazing way. I know the trip impacted all of us, and I hope that we made a great impact in Skagway. It was amazing and strange and beautiful, and we are all thankful to have been hosted there. We got home to our house at 2am last night after an epic journey that should have had everyone grumpy and fighting, but we all had fun. If that isn't proof of God's providence in all of this, than I'm not sure how it was accomplished.
Some of our students spent time tonight with high schoolers, finally, (most of our time has been spent with jr high and college/young adults) and they were very open about what they do with their time. sex, drugs, and alcohol. We only have one day left, so we need to come back next year! start the fundraising now. Coming back next year we will have way more street cred with the youth and they might start coming sooner in the week to hang out. On the bright side, we had an epic amazing race with the kids. Charlie created a race that led them all over Skagway and left me sitting in an orange jumpsuit on a corner, much to the delight of passing bus tours. We painted and stripped a TON of wood today, and there is so much more we can do here. Tomorrow it's deadliest catch with kids, working at the fish derby with Robin Williams, and gutting fish to make sure no one has loaded them with weights, plus more painting. We will end the night with a lot of packing, cleaning and hanging out with our new friends at the point with smores, and hopefully some whales this time. Have to admit, we are working really, really hard, but we are living the life. You all should come next year!!!!
We doubled our camp attendance again today! that means we had 90% of the jr highers in Skagway. We did Alaska's got talent and boy did we see talent. there was juggling, singing, an epic song by Mariah and Shade and Jaquelyn riding a skateboard pulled by Kai the dog. It was great! Then we did more work around the church. We took a break and went on the train ride up into the mountains, where we saw a BEAR! a young super cute bear. It was like Christmas morning. Then we headed back to church and hung out with the young adults and more junior highers. Our kids were really good at hanging out with those kids and making them feel like they were a part of our team.God is stretching us and pushing us to talk to all kinds of people and get to know their stories. It is great and everyone wants to come back! Currently everyone is playing Twister and it's midnight. By the way Kirsten Young gets the award for the best mail!!!
Today was weird in the best ways possible, but weird for sure. In addition to our camp thing happening, we also helped host a Christian cruise workgroup. On their cruise they had the option to do a service project, so 30 people came to first pres. Skagway today to help out, and we were there to greet them and give them instructions. After they got over their disappointment at not getting to work with authentic Alaskans they gladly took instructions from our students and went to work. Our students were awesome! They got a lot of refurbishing done and left a lot for us to finish this week. So add construction to our list of stuff to do (actually it’s fun though.) In the meantime we did a Survivor day for the kids and had 5 instead of 2 today, woohoo, more than doubled. We also got a little time off today and some of us went hiking with Ryan’s amazing dog kai, it was good to just chill. Tonight we are heading, hopefully with some Skagwegian youth, to a point on the bay where whales have been feeding and we are going to hang out there and have smores. Our students are awesome and continually going out of their comfort zones to reach out to their peers in Skagway, they are super amazing. This church is really cool too, they are open for anyone to come in and take a shower or just hang out, and they feed us and anyone else that meanders in. Very cool way to be the church!
We are loving Skagway!! it is beautiful! Just the ferry ride to get here was epic. We saw orcas swimming the in the distance, tons of glacier fed waterfalls. It truly reminded us of what a fun, big and creative God we serve. Once we got here we were quickly transported to our first Skagway home at the Chief of Police’s house. We stayed in his backyard church (of which he is also the pastor) for the first two nights as another team prepared to leave our real home for the week. We spent Sunday going to church and checking out the tourist street. We spent a lot of time getting to know the locals, and inviting the youth to come hang out with us. Our youth have been amazing at reaching out to everyone. Today is only half over and we already had a daycamp for 2 jr high students (more are coming tomorrow) and helped to some work on the church to get ready for a bigger project tomorrow. We have barely stopped moving so we are exhausted but having a great time. By the way Chris has been sleeping well. Pastor Ryan is great and the people of this church are fantastic! Hopefully a bunch of people show up to hang out tonight!!!
it's 10:20 and it looks like it's dinner time outside! After a painfully early morning, and a long day of traveling, we made it to our overnight home in Juneau. Just across the street is the bay and there were bald eagles on the beach right in frot of us. It certainly makes you think about how amazing God's creation is. Tomorrow afternoon we get on a the boat for six hours to finally get to Skagway! You can pray for an easy travel day for us, strength, health and all that, as we are all quite tired and have a lot of stuff to carry onto the boat with us.
A couple of months ago, I was sweating the money it was going to take to get us to Alaska and back, and trying to figure out if we should still even procede with this trip. God must have been rolling with laughter, because He knew all along, not only would we get enough, we would have some extra to do everything we need and more! Thanks to our MPC family, and our own friends and family, we are ready to tackle anything that comes our way. Except maybe bears, no one is allowed to tackle bears, we are staying in the van for that part.
We leave on July 9th and start our long journey North. We need lots of prayer, like so much,that God is borderline annoyed with all of you. We get to put on a camp for jr. high students during the day, and host some events for teens and young adults each night. We want to give those students the best week ever! We know it can't be easy being so isolated (they are a 6 hr boat ride away from a big city, and two hours from the next town). Our hope is to encourage those students and help Skagway form a jr high ministry that will go on long after we are gone, and support their high school student ministries, as we share our own faith. It's going to be harder than building a house or retrofitting an orphanage. I hope all of us will be changed by this trip too, each of us is going in with our own faith struggles and questions. I know we are already being challenged.
I have to admit, I have been a skeptic of this whole Alaska experience from the beginning, but I am excited to see what God has had in mind all along.