We were able to go on a mission trip in July with the worship ministry at our church. We have a new worship pastor and he has a relationship with a small church plant in Vancouver, Canada.
On the way up there, we flew into Seattle, then rented vans and drove across the border, so we had lunch at the famous Pikes Place and I got some coffee from the original Starbucks!
We were there for a week, and to kick things off, we spent the first day having a "fun day" touring around Vancouver seeing a few sites and learning about the city.
We went to a beautiful park, did a bike tour on a trail around the water, and took a boat ride. We somehow got classified as adult enough to drive a van and also drive a boat, so that was a pretty fun experience for the week!
The rest of the week was spent helping out the church during their "serve vancouver" week they sponsored. We learned that Vancouver is a very un-churched city and the people are hard to reach, the focus of the church we helped out was developing relationships with the people and then being able to lead them to Christ. We had a Texas BBQ where we served food and even did some line dancing, we helped two different days in cleaning out and sprucing up a community garden, and we did a lot of singing to nursing homes and other various places like on the college campus. We also did a movie night in the park one night for families. It was a neat experience because it was a different type of mission trip than I had ever been on. There were a wide variety of ages from college to the oldest was 70! We also did different type of work, but basically were there to help promote and serve and encourage the church we were helping which is a very small group right now as well as do what we could to talk about God to the people. I also got to be the "trip nurse" which was a fun thing for me to be able to do. I am really glad we got to go not only for the learning experience, but also it was really fun getting to know some people in choir that I didn't know very well before this trip!
