SERVE 2019

SERVE Fort McMurray was a trip to remember. However, now that I think about it, every SERVE trip would be a trip to remember, but this year was the trip because it was the first SERVE trip that I participated in. SERVE missions trips, for students grade 8 – 12, are hosted by CRC churches all over North America and designed for these youth to work with host churches on various community projects. Three different youth groups participated in this SERVE trip: Willoughby CRC and both Clinton CRC and Aylmer CRC from Ontario. During the week we were divided into mixed small groups that worked together at the various work sites. These sites included: Evergreen CRC’s Eden Community Garden, Fort Mac Soup Kitchen and Food Bank, The Rotary House Seniors Lodge, The Lionheart Creative Arts Kids Camp, local kids Sports Camp, and ASHFAM (a project supporting adolescent mothers).  Much of the work we did supported these organizations helping them complete projects such as: emptying boxes of toothpaste at the Food Bank, digging a trench in the Community Garden to create a pollinator trail for bees, preparing and serving a meal at the soup kitchen, playing games and enjoying lunch with seniors at the Rotary Lodge, sorting baby clothes and ripping out carpets for new flooring at ASHFAM and interacting with kids at the Kids Camps. Through these and many other activities, we were able to share the love of Jesus with people in the community of Fort Mac. The SERVE experience will impact me for a long time. I learned that even though we were very different, we were able to complete the work because we bring different strengths and skills to the projects. Our youth connected well with people outside of our group and it didn’t take long before the children and youth from Evergreen CRC felt like one of us. I saw how you can make a great impact through small things. One story you will hear is that Pastor Curtis did not allow us to bring our phones on the trip, or any electronics for that matter, which made us really salty, especially when we learned this was not the case for all the others. However, by the end of the week, our youth group collectively agreed that without our phones and other electronics we were able to connect better with each other and the people we interacted with. But that didn’t stop us from bugging Pastor Curtis about it. We still went out of our way to make sure he knew how much we ‘hated’ not having them.  Thanks, Pastor Curtis, for making us leave our phones behind otherwise we might have missed seeing the small ways God was at work through the connections we made in Fort Mac.