Monday, March 9, 2015

BCM Spring Break 2015 SWVA Mission Trip

Although arriving a bit later than the rest, I have joined the team from Baptist Collegiate Ministries at Virginia Tech in Southwest Virginia (SWVA) for their 2015 Spring Break mission trip. Our team consists of myself, three other guys (Bradley, Dakota, and Drew), four girls (Ellen, Heather, Kim, and Krista), and a BCM staff member (Dietrich) who has joined us for the first couple of days. Our team will again be working with the Southwest Virginia Partnership over the next week, helping with various construction type projects and building on the work of past teams.

Most of our team left Blacksburg on Saturday afternoon and arrived in Nickelsville, VA yesterday evening. They purchased our groceries for the week on the way down, and then attended church at First Baptist Church of Nickelsville this morning. Dietrich and I had to come a little later, due to prior commitments, and drove down together this afternoon.

When we arrived, Dietrich and I unpacked, and then the team decided to spend our Sunday afternoon touring a local zoo. After quite a bit of... adventurous driving, we arrived at the gates of the zoo. Unfortunately, as we then discovered, the zoo doesn't open until mid-March, and will open even later this year, due to snow damage.
Disappointed that the zoo is closed.
After that disappointment, we decided to drive to Gate City, VA to purchase some "sports equipment" that we could play with while spending the afternoon outside in the warm weather. We found a Dollar General that was open, and purchased a cheap frisbee and a wiffle ball and bat.
Crossing Main Street in Gate City.
When we got back to The Manor (an old nursing home that has been turned into a housing facility for teams working with the SWVA Partnership), we decided to play a friendly game of wiffle ball. During this game, I took a lot of grief for my pitching ability and for hitting the people I was pitching to with the (plastic) ball. It took four walks with the bases loaded for my team to decide it was time to call in the relief pitcher. I was also given a hard time for being overly enthusiastic while tagging (certain people) out while they were running to home plate.

Dinner with the team.
After our dinner of spaghetti, salad, and bread (a BCM mission trip staple), we had a short meeting with Tony and Jan, the project coordinators for the SWVA Partnership. They told us a little bit about our project for the week, which will largely consist of redoing the floor in someone's home. We will also be working at the local food pantry, and will split people between the two projects as needed.

After our meeting with Tony and Jan, as well as our team devotion and prayer time, we spent the rest of the evening trying to kill each other. We played Mafia and Body Body until about midnight, when everyone decided to go to bed. We head out around 9:00 AM in the morning to our worksite.

If you would, please join us in praying for the things that we prayed about together as a team this evening. First of all, please pray for the other mission teams from BCMVT serving over Spring Break - both stateside (Atlanta, GA and Thibodaux, LA) as well as internationally (Toronto, Canada and London, England). Please pray for our team's safety as we will be doing construction work and tools (powered or not) can be dangerous. Lastly, please pray for team to have opportunities to show the love of Christ in both word and action this week.

Check back for updates, and follow our tweets with the hashtag #SWVA2015.
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