Mission Arlington '09 ~ Part 1

Sunday night Wes and I returned home from our mission trip to Arlington, TX. We were originally going to Acuna, Mexico (the place we went last year on a mission trip), but due to the safety issues and problems they have been having at the Mexican border, that trip had to be cancelled. We were sad about that, but knew that God must have had other plans for our group.

The trip was changed to Arlington, and we were going to be helping out at a place called Mission Arlington. We really had no idea what we were going to be doing, which was both exciting and a bit frustrating for those of us who are planners! But it was a good lesson in just letting go and letting God be in control of things. It turned out to be such a wonderful experience! We were blessed for sure to be able to see this place and help them out for a few days.  We were all blown away by Mission Arlington and what all they do for the people in that community, and all in the name of Jesus!  

I will try to tell and show as much as I can about our trip.  I could write for pages and pages about it, but I'll try to keep it as short as possible.  Here we are ready to fly out of Buffalo:

 

As a brand new church plant, Restoration Church obviously does not have a huge number of people attending yet, but we had 14 people sign up for this mission trip!  At the time of the sign up, that was about 1/3 of our church!  That in itself is so amazing.

So we all stayed in this building that used to be an office building that Mission Arlington now owns.  It was pretty cool with a common area in the middle with several couches (perfect for playing mafia and other games at night), and bedrooms on either side.  Here is the common area:

Here is Wes's room he shared with 3 other guys:

And here is my room I shared with one other girl:

Here is the main office of Mission Arlington:

Day 1 started with a tour of Mission Arlington just so we could see what all goes on there. It was started over twenty years ago, so it has grown and expanded so much over the years that they now have several buildings.  They have one section that is kind of like a row of townhouses, and they have split those up into a dental clinic, clothing donations, a day shelter, storage, etc. Here is the clothing place where people in need can come in and "shop" for whatever their families need.

Here is the outside of the free dental clinic:

In a separate building, they have the food pantry storage:

And then they have a large warehouse where they store all the furniture donations:

Inside the main office building they also have the food pantry where families get to come in and get one bag of food per week.  They said they have 180 people A DAY come in and get food! This was one of the most amazing things to me.  To think that they have that many people coming in every single day and they never run out of food (which is all donations) - it's like a modern-day version of Jesus feeding the 5,000 when the food just kept multiplying and they had enough for everyone!

After the tour, we went out on our first "job".  Every other week they load up a bus with all kinds of things - household items, toys, perishable foods, etc. - and just unload it at these apartments for people to come get anything they need.  All we had to do was drive up and start unloading, and the people started coming out.  They know Mission Arlington does this every other week, and the best part is that they know the reason they do it.

Precious children:

We went to two apartments and unloaded the stuff and had many people come get many things. Rose, who is a Mission Arlington employee, was with us and she knows a lot of these people and was telling us that they really only take what they need, so we actually had a lot of things left over.  It was so humbling for a lot of us to see this. Most of this stuff we would see as trash to throw out, but to these people it was treasure.

After the apartment giveaways, that afternoon we got to go back to the first apartment we went to to have a kind of backyard Bible club for the kids. This was definitely one of the highlights for a lot of us. These kids were so precious. They loved having us there, and we were able to play with them, color, sing, and share a Bible story.

We shared the story of Jesus healing two blind men, and our group acted it out for them while one of our guys told the story.  Here are Wes and Joe being the blind men:

Here we are playing some games with them:

Wes leading in a game of Simon Says:

This little boy, Matthew, was fascinated with all our cameras.  Here is Tim showing him his pictures:

Precious girl:

Here is Alex (one of Restoration's pastors) in action at Duck Duck Goose:

Me and Matthew:

Day 1 was a full and great day.  We did make a stop that evening at Walmart of course, and this one had Texas longhorns and stars on the outside:
That night we went out for some Texas barbecue, and it was good.  Wes is enjoying his ice cream:

So that was our first day.  The rest of the trip is to be continued so keep checking back........