My name is Kingsley Rice, and I am 15 years old. Recently I went to the Mission: THERE trip to Danville, Virginia. The reason I went on this trip was so that I could get to know some of the people at my church that I have never talked to before. I was honestly a little hesitant to come on this trip at first because I didn’t really know who all was going to go on this trip and if there would be anyone that I knew. I had never been on a mission trip before and didn’t really know what happens on mission trips other than working on different projects. This trip helped me to not only get to know people in our church, but to make relationships with people I had never talked to before and to create stronger relationships with the people I had already known.
I didn’t just get to make relationships with the people from our church but also the people from Grace and Main. The people from Grace and Main were so welcoming to us and so hard working. Some of the people would even go to work in the garden in the morning and work at their paying jobs in the afternoon. It was really cool to see the dedication they had to this garden. I thought that for this mission trip the main focus would be to work on the garden but once we started working, I got to really see how this community of people comes together and cares for each other, and it made me realize that the main focus was to create relationships with the people from Grace and Main and get to know them. It was really inspiring because sometimes we can tend to look at someone and assume things about them but seeing the community that they have built was very eye opening for me. Every night, everyone from AFBC would gather around the fire back at the camp and talk about everyone’s day and one of the nights, someone said something about if we saw these people somewhere random -like downtown- and not in the garden, what would we think of them? This comment really made me think about how sometimes we can be so quick to judge people just by their looks and the way they may carry themselves, but we never know what the people are like because we don’t take the time to get to know them.
Another thing was on the last day, before we left, we got to hear the stories of how the community around the garden formed. From those stories, one of the things I took away from them was that we can start the most important relationships by looking to the people that live on our street or in the same apartment complexes as us and simply knock on their door and ask if they want to come over for a Bible study or just have a time to read scripture together. This mission trip was so inspiring for me, and I am so thankful I got to experience this with the people from the church, and being able to create those relationships will forever stick with me!
Recent Comments