Here
is a snippet of what I sent out to my prayer team for Beach Reach two weeks
before I went
For those of you that don’t know, I’m going on a mission trip to South Padre
Island during Spring Break called Beach Reach. Its the same trip I did my
freshman and junior year of college. Different ministries, including the
Wesley, are going simply to serve spring breakers. While we are there, we are
going to offer people free food at a morning and midnight breakfast and
free rides. We really want to build relationships and love on them. In the
midst of all that, when we felt led, we also hope to have spiritual
conversations with people to share how God has affected our lives with his
love and grace.
trip and it’s going to be pretty challenging. I’m helping to lead a small group
this year and feel like I need a lot of prayers for humbleness (really a
lot), and leadership capabilities as well as just general safety and compassion
for all of those around me.
And now for some reflections on Beach Reach
Below are some questions that one of my staff leaders, Marcy, asked us on the way home and my answers
to give a summary of sorts on the week.
1.) What was the best experience of your trip?
seeing people on my team become confident in their abilities to reach out and
talk to Spring Breakers. I liked being able to just encourage my team for the
most part in the spiritual gifts that I knew they had but they just weren’t
confident in yet. We try prepare people as much as possible for what Beach
Reach will look like but in many cases there are simply things you can not prep
for. Sleep deprivation difficulties on our end, the crazy things that people
will do when they are drunk or high or both on the Spring Breaker’s end, the
differences in the way that we were taught to outreach, even the words we use
that can be offensive each other were discovered on the trip and had to be
dealt with in a way that was respective of all. Despite the crazy stories that
always come back from Beach Reach some of my favorite times are actually after
we come back and realize how much God was moving around us from stories from
our friends that we didn’t really get to see all week.
2.) What did you learn about yourself through this week?
There were a few things that I
learned well more like was reminded of was that I can have patience with people
even when I’m at the end of my very short rope. I simply have to ask God for
it. There were more than a few times that week in which I did have to simply
rely on God for his patience to come through me, otherwise I’m pretty sure I
would have snapped at someone and most likely not the people I was actually
frustrated with.
more applies to Joe and me. Joe had a disturbing dream that he mentioned that
he had but didn’t want to tell me what it was about until later in the week and
I just worried about it until he told me. I had a migraine on Wednesday and
asked others to not tell him how much I was hurting b/c I didn’t want him to
worry about me. Through that and both of us getting frustrated with each other
we learned that we need be completely honest with each other even if we are trying
to protect the other person because eventually its going to come up.
3.) What did you learn about God through this week?
That God continues to show up in
every situation but sometimes our eyes and minds are blinded by what is going
on around us. I had forgotten exactly how much spiritual warfare is associated
in my mind with Beach Reach and being attacked in ways I hadn’t thought of,
like what happened with Joe and me and how distracting it was for both of us
until we were honest with each other.
Through Him all things are possible.
That he speaks in powerful and weird
ways that I can’t always comprehend or make sense of enough to even put into a sentence.
4.) What things will you take from this week and apply to UT
or later in life?
Well honestly
I feel stuck at UT right now, like I’m not sure what my purpose is here
anymore. And maybe this year I just needed to learn that sometimes while God
calls us to be preset and invest in the lives of others around us, but he calls
us to something else at the same time that might not seem like ministry or
worship – in my case that has been school. I’m not doing it very well but I am
still set to walk in May, take one class at ACC and then graduate in August.
all of the stuff that I learned either about myself or about God can also be
applied later in life in ways that I have no knowledge of at this moment.
Some funny stories for your
enjoyment:
*One night in the prayer room, Alex one of my teammates was praying that people
from UT would get on the bus and that we could make good connections with
them…the next text we get from our crew is a message saying “a group
from Utah just got on the bus”
*We were driving a short bus – that was our van for the week. On Thursday we
are supposed to head down to the beach for baptisms and parking is always an
issue because they don’t like people to park to go to Coke a Cola beach unless
they are guests at Isla Grand. So we were to park in a parking garage near the
beach and walk down. Well remember we are driving a bus that’s pretty tall, so
we try to go into the parking garage and we’re fine for about 50 feet, then we
hit the emergency exit door on the top of the bus and get stuck…so the
baptisms are in 20 minutes, we’re stuck and every way that we try to get the
bus unstuck isn’t working.
Some fellow Beach Reachers (I still have no idea where this particular group
was from…maybe Tyler, TX) see that we are stuck and come ask us how they can
help. One guy from their team said “well we can pile a bunch a fat people
in the bus”, his words not mine. At first we had no idea what he meant but
then it clicked “yeah lets do that!” “HEY EVERYONE GET ON THE
BUS!!” About 25 people squeezed into the bus and that lowered it enough that
we could back out!!
And once school winds down a bit (this week has been crazy for me!) then I will
edit the film clips and pictures I took into a short movie.
