Sunday, July 17, 2005
Vancouver, eh?
Got back from my mission trip yesterday around 6-ish. It was an intense week both in the city and in my life. Needless to say, God is tricky, as Luke likes to say- And I suppose it's true in a sense. I was totally unprepared for everything that I did last week because I was not in my comfort zone for most of the time.
In the mornings I went to the local Union Gospel Mission building that was a drug and alcohol rehab center. Me working with adults? Men who are trying to recover from their past? What was God thinking? Well He was- and I wasn't. In the afternoons we did VBS- and I tried hard, but it had seemed that the morning had sucked all the energy from me. All week it seemed like I was running as fast as I could, but wasn't going anywhere. That frustrated me and wore me out.
Wednesday night when I would be usually going to Traffic at home, the whole group (a church from Denver and Calgary) went on a prayer walk and then went to Street Church. The prayer walk was intense to say the least. It was heart-breaking to see all the needles, needle packages and alcohol lying freely around the street. Let alone all the people who were saturated by it. We walked around the poorest part of Vancouver- and saw things that most people never see in their lifetime. I remember walking past a woman with a needle in her arm, wondering what had happened for her to be in such a place...
That's what last week brought out- thoughts about people's past. As we all heard the homeless' stories, we soon learned that our preconceived sterotypes were dead wrong. These people have stories all their own and lives that are totally different from the next person. That just because they're currently in the same spot now doesn't mean that they all lived the same life. It makes so much sense now, I don't know why I didn't realize it before.
This trip was difficult in the sense that I was dealing with things that I never had before. Luke and I were working some grey areas in our relationship, I was in a place I wasn't really sure that I would be..successful at, the countless homeless filled me with hopelessness and the drugs smoothered everything. It was harder than last year, but yet, just as fruitful.
In the mornings I went to the local Union Gospel Mission building that was a drug and alcohol rehab center. Me working with adults? Men who are trying to recover from their past? What was God thinking? Well He was- and I wasn't. In the afternoons we did VBS- and I tried hard, but it had seemed that the morning had sucked all the energy from me. All week it seemed like I was running as fast as I could, but wasn't going anywhere. That frustrated me and wore me out.
Wednesday night when I would be usually going to Traffic at home, the whole group (a church from Denver and Calgary) went on a prayer walk and then went to Street Church. The prayer walk was intense to say the least. It was heart-breaking to see all the needles, needle packages and alcohol lying freely around the street. Let alone all the people who were saturated by it. We walked around the poorest part of Vancouver- and saw things that most people never see in their lifetime. I remember walking past a woman with a needle in her arm, wondering what had happened for her to be in such a place...
That's what last week brought out- thoughts about people's past. As we all heard the homeless' stories, we soon learned that our preconceived sterotypes were dead wrong. These people have stories all their own and lives that are totally different from the next person. That just because they're currently in the same spot now doesn't mean that they all lived the same life. It makes so much sense now, I don't know why I didn't realize it before.
This trip was difficult in the sense that I was dealing with things that I never had before. Luke and I were working some grey areas in our relationship, I was in a place I wasn't really sure that I would be..successful at, the countless homeless filled me with hopelessness and the drugs smoothered everything. It was harder than last year, but yet, just as fruitful.
