I got back from Los Angeles, California two days ago, and I am going to attempt to do justice to the amazing things I got to experience in California on the mission trip. Our group of fourteen teenagers, six leaders and 1 1-year-old, went to help out in any way we could with an urban ministry center called Harambee. Harambee was started more than twenty years ago by a man named John Perkins, who was interested in the ideas of racial reconciliation. Today, Harambee is a preschool, a community center, an elementary school, a summer camp and a testament to God's faithfulness and power in even the most dire situations. The corner where Harambee is located used to be called blood corner and was considered one of the most dangerous places in southern California because of its gang warfare. Even police helicopters wouldn't fly over the area for fear of gunfire. You can read and learn a lot more at their website.
We worked each day with the program, from 8am until 6pm we were helping in some way, whether it was with family time- when all the kids come together for skits, songs and a lesson,- or whether we were painting the playground or a room in the buliding, or whether we were running Vacation Bible School, or just hanging out with the kids. Harambee's current head is Rudy Carasco, a husband, father, leader and dedicated Christian. He emphasizes the importance of meeting people where they are and building on what they have. Those things really stuck with me throughout my time at Harambee and I hope they will continue to impact my interactions with people everywhere. The way you preach the gospel to each individual person has to change depending on their life experiences and where they are right now. For instance, the way I would talk about Jesus with a kid who had grown up in a suburban, midlde class family and been going to church all his life is significantly different from the conversation I would have with a little girl who'd never heard about Jesus, whose father was in prison and whose uncle took most of her family's money in order to buy drugs. That's the kind of stuff you run into daily at Harambee. But there are the triumphs too. I was sick one day, and the next day, a little girl asked me how I felt. I told her I was much better and she said she knew why. "It's because I prayed for you." And that's when the tears come and you are reminded again that God is working in each of these kids' lives constantly.
But Rudy also told us that these kids needed to have expectations set for them-- behaviorally, socially, educationally, etc-- that just because they had experience hard stuff didn't mean that we shouldn't lovingly set expectations for them. It was a difficult balance to find, but we tried. We had some wonderful "fun" days where our team got to go to Six Flags, to the beach, to see a professional soccer game, to China town, to Hollywood. But those things I'll talk about later.
These kids changed my life. They had grown up in a lot of ways long before they should have. They had seen more than is fair. But they weren't caught up in the negativity. They wanted to play knock-out with us. They wanted to hold our hands. They wanted to talk about skateboarding or television. I saw a lot of hope and a lot of love in these kids that I don't experience every day.
The last thing I want to blog about before I call it a post (okay, that was bad...) is my asthma attack. I had sports-induced asthma for awhile a few years back, but I haven't shown symptoms in a while. I don't think I've used my inhaler in years. But as we were walking back to our vans from the soccer stadium, I started feeling weird. As we were on the highway in miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic, I started having an asthma attack. Both vans pulled off the interstate and into the parking lot of a Taco Bell. One of the other team members, my good friend Cameron, had an inhaler that she had almost not brought with her. The nurse on our team okay-ed me using it and eventually my breathing normalized. It wasn't until after Cameron and I talked later that I realized just how much God had his hand in that situation. Cameron hadn't brought her inhaler on any outing the team had had up until that point. And she almost didn't that night. But she kept feeling a nagging need to bring the inhaler. God has been faithful, he will be again, and His ways are mysterious and amazing to me. I don't want to think about what could have happened if Cameron hadn't listened to the Holy Spirit that night...

God showed himself in some amazing ways over the course of the trip. I learned a lot about grace, the power of prayer, love, cooperation and God's faithfulness and power. I will keep blogging as I find the time and the right words to express the amazing experiences I had on this trip.