We're Home!
Well, it looks like everyone on our team has returned safely to Abilene!
We had a great day on Saturday, with VBS in the morning and a musical performance/hot dog supper at Open Arms on Saturday night. We also enjoyed visiting with the mothers of some of the children that had spent the last three days with us, and there was a lot of sadness when we finally had to leave at around 8:00 or so.
Also, on Saturday night, we were joined by a group of Junior Scholars from ACU who helped to serve ice cream sundaes after the musical performance. They also helped to clean up, which was
really great because most of us were starting to run out of gas by Saturday night.
I wish that I could tell you stories about our experiences, but one of our commitments when we went into Open Arms was that we would be careful not to do anything to reveal the identity of these families to people outside of our group, and I don't want to say anything that might put these families at risk. Suffice it to say, however, that our team members made a lot of connections to some kids and mothers this week, and that neither our team members nor the kids and mothers are going to forget the experience any time soon.
On Sunday morning, we had a time of worship with most of the members of our team at the Community Enrichment Center, beside the Richland Hills Church of Christ. It was a rich, and often emotional, time of closure for the entire group.
Many, many thanks to everyone who kept us in their prayers last week!
Final Day
Today is the final day for our VBS and for our musical performances. Tomorrow morning, our plan is to worship together and then share lunch before everyone heads home.
We're going to be pretty busy for the next few hours. We'll be doing our last day of VBS at Open Arms Home from 10 to noon. Then, we'll be back in the late afternoon to share hot dogs with the children and mothers at Open Arms and to perform the musical for them. To round out the day, we'll serve ice cream sundaes to everyone before leaving.
One of the impressive things about Christ's Haven yesterday was its massive campus. They had horses and basketball courts and tennis courts and, of course, a sizeable playground, which included a merry-go-round.
The merry-go-round was a huge hit with our kids, who ended up playing on it both before and after the performance. Here is a photo that was taken shortly before we departed:
More From Days One and Two
This morning, the kids performed the musical for a small group of children at
Christ's Haven. My highlight for the morning: watching some of the children in the audience sing the chorus along with our kids at the end of the musical. The song, which I never tire of hearing myself, just captivated another audience:
Tell all the worldThe everlasting storyTell all the worldThe good newsTell of the Father and the SonHow the Spirit makes us OneTell every boy, tell every girlTell all the worldIn the meantime, here are a few pictures from our trip to Fortress yesterday morning:
First Night of VBS
We just wrapped up our first night of VBS at the
Open Arms Home. Our own kids outnumbered the local kids, but things still worked out great. We had LOTS of infants and toddlers and, surprisingly, a group of five middle school kids, who were eager to participate.
Things seemed eerily familiar to me tonight. The same folks who do VBS and bible classes at Highland were just doing them at a different place. I wonder if that is what being mission-oriented is about - taking the good things that happen in your own faith community and bringing them out into the world.
At the end of the evening, we had an unplanned group meeting, where the kids talked about their experiences from the day and we talked about the events that will be coming up on Friday. We ended with a group prayer, with the parents holding hands as they encircled the kids.
Tomorrow: we do the musical at Christ's Haven and then have a second night of VBS at Open Arms.
Fortress Performance
We finished our first performance of the musical, at the
Fortress Church, a few minutes ago. Susan took several pictures, and I'm hoping to have them downloaded on my computer by tonight so that I can post a few.
I am absolutely blown away by what the volunteers and workers at Fortress are doing for the kids of that neighborhood. This is a neighborhood that regularly appears on
Cops, mind you. Last night, as we were driving through the neighborhood, Sheila spotted a couple of guys in a van that were engaged in a "business transaction" of some sort.
But today, Fortress was a place filled with joy and hope and song. Our audience included not only the Fortress kids and interns, but also a youth group from Alabama that graciously shared their sound system with us. Following the musical was pizza and more singing (and some pretty impressive dancing from the local kids, too).
More to come later today, hopefully.
Countdown to Departure
Wave one for our team will leave for Fort Worth tomorrow. We will be making sure that all of the places we will be visiting are ready for us and putting together the last few bits of technology that we will need for the musical.
In the meantime, I love the way that our group has come together. Most of us are inexperienced in doing this kind-of planned, mission trip, so - while this may be a familiar expeirence to some of you - almost everything is new to us.
We have such a deep well of gifts to draw from. Susan Piersall, Julie Douthit, and Karen Gilliland, along with our kids, have done a great job putting the musical together. We have people who can pull trailers and move stuff around. We have artsy people to help the kids with crafts (Cindy Seaborn springs to mind, though there are others). We have musicians (Grant Boone has already coined the phrase "Michael Gilliland and the VBS orchestra"). We have people who love to play games with kids. We have people who can organize and set up meals. We have people who are donating time and supplies and materials that they were never even asked to give. We even have someone (Susan Lewis) who is going to journal our experiences in video and photographs.
Oh yeah, and - in addition to taking care of our other technology issues - I get to blog!
I'm sure that we will encounter adversity during the next four days, and I hope that you'll be praying that - when it comes - we'll be ready to face it. But for now, everyone seems to love what they are doing, and everyone seems to be doing what they do best.
Photos from Highland Performance
Our kids performed two songs from the musical during a Highland assembly earlier this month. Thanks to Susan Lewis, we have pictures from the performance, which can be found
here, on Snapfish. You have to create an account and log in to see the pictures, but I'm hoping that we will find a way to display pictures directly in our blog entries shortly.
Mac and Cheese Money
In preparing for our trip, we've had to ask a few questions about the needs of the poor in the Fort Worth area.
One of the surprising answers that we've heard? Macaroni and cheese.
The food bank that is maintained by Richland Hills, it seems, takes in lots of donations from bakeries and grocery stores. These donations tend to be heavy on staples like bread and canned goods and cereals. Even milk and eggs. But the food bank experiences a constant shortage of mac and cheese. One or more boxes of this wonder-food apparently go out with almost every client.
Our families (especially the kids) could immediately understand the appeal of macaroni and cheese. Its easy to make, great to eat, and simple to warm (and re-warm). We love the stuff ourselves. So, we thought, why not bring some mac and cheese with us when we visit the food bank?
For the last few months, all of our families have been saving money to purchase macaroni and cheese. Our plan was for each family to collect a little spare change, and then buy a case or two (maybe even a dozen) that we could donate to the food bank when we arrived.
Now, it seems, we have a problem. Not a BAD problem, really. Instead, its the sort-of problem that arises when you've just finished feeding thousands of people and you can't quite figure out what do with all those pesky left-over baskets of food.
With the money we've collected, it seems, we aren't talking about four or five cases anymore, but something in the range of FIFTY cases (if the current trend continues).
We THINK that we're going to have space to transport all of these cases to Fort Worth if need be, but now we're starting to think in terms of the possibility of using some of the money to do other things - like purchase soft drinks for the kids at Fortress or using some of the money for making a cash donation.
So there you have it: loaves and fishes. We do arithmetic using pluses and minuses. God, however, is more comfortable working with exponentials.
Welcome!
What happens when you take eleven young families with a passion for Jesus, give them a great children's musical, hand them a few VBS materials, and send them off to the inner city to minister to children?
Ready or not, a small group of families from West Texas is about to find out, beginning on June 23, and this space will serve as a journal of our story.
Our group is a part of the Into All the World Campaign, a collective effort by members of the
Highland Church in Abilene, Texas to send families on missions throughout the globe. While many of the mission groups will be traveling to such remote locales as Brazil, Africa, and Hawaii, our group will be making a two hour trip to the East to the inner city of Fort Worth, Texas.
We are comprised primarily of families with children in elementary school. Our kids have been hard at work for many weeks now preparing a children's musical called
Tell All the World (written by two unbelievably creative members of our church), and the adults have been sorting through all sorts of cool-looking VBS materials, trying to come up with just the right ideas for telling an important story to some kids that we can't wait to meet.
We are preparing a Vacation Bible School for the kids at
Open Arms Home, a facility that provides shelter and assistance to women and children fleeing domestic violence, and our kids will also be performing a musical for the Open Arms kids. In addition, our kids will also perform the same musical for children at the
Fortress Church of Christ and at
Christ's Haven.
Our plan is also to share lots of pizza and hot dogs and soft drinks and ice cream with these children and their families - probably putting on a few collective pounds in the process - and to just have lots of fun as we help our children to see (or, more likely, as our children help
us to see) what it means to participate in the mission of Jesus in the world.
I can't promise posts every day between now and June 23, but I'm hoping to get in at least four or five posts, and - with any luck - we'll also post daily updates (and photos!) while we're in Fort Worth.
I'm also hoping that I can get a few additional members of our team to blog in this space. So hang on, there is much more to come...
- Matt
