We made it!!

We are home! We made it safe and sound. As we drove home in the van, I and Denny ended up in the van made up of mostly girls, it was so amazing to hear the energy and new friendships. The laughter and stories told me that some good relationships had been made or had gone deeper.

One thing that Keith (of Epic Life Church) told us in our debriefing is that we need to do all that we can to not lose the passion from a missions trip. He mentioned that the average time is 10 days before the passion burns out. So pray for our team to remember the lessons we learned on our Urban Journey and pray that we can implement some of those lessons to our daily lives before our routine attacks us and sends us back to our rut.

Also, as Keith told us the vision that God gave him for reaching Seattle he asked us to keep praying for him and his team. The area they have been called to is full of sex shops, prostitution, drugs and all sorts of godless distractions. This will be a tough time but is obvious that they need the help.

So, pray for the Epic Life Church in north Seattle as they reach the Aurora area. Their little church building just off the corner of Aurora and Northgate (the Northgate Baptist Church building).

As for our trip, here is just a small list of serving opportunities we had while in Seattle:
Spiritual preparations times
Served breakfast at the Union Gospel Mission
Sorted food for food banks with the Food Lifeline
made a sand volleyball court for community outreach at the church property
pulled weeds and helped to clean up the grounds at the church property
Aurora beautification project along the store fronts planting flowers and cleaning up weeds
scrubbed and cleaned rooms in the church building which is used for a k-12 school
painted some property for the Jubilee Women's shelter
Cleaned out, bleached, scrubbed and reorganized the Immanuel community service food bank
toured the New Horizon's center for homeless teens

This is among other many opportunities we had to build relationships with the community.

Thanks for your support and prayers.

we will have some students sharing on this blog about some of their insights of the trip in the coming days.

Darin