This past July, I was privileged to be a part of our EYC Mission Team on its trip to the town of Smithers in southern West Virginia. There, our group of twenty-five joined several hundred other young people and adults for a week of worship, small group devotions, and Christian service among more than sixty households scattered around the region.

In presenting the week’s spiritual theme, the organizers recalled the old days when you would pull up to a “full-service” gas station and an attendant would not only pump the petrol, but also wash the windows, check the oil, and make sure there was enough air in the tires.

And so, throughout the week, we focused upon biblical passages featuring Christ’s own self-giving life, with the staff encouraging us each day to live similarly, developing a “full-service Jesus attitude.” That was to be our goal as our work teams went out to our assignments each morning: to bring the sacrificial love of Christ to the families whose homes we repaired.

It is well-known that West Virginia is one of the poorest states in the nation. One of our evening speakers, an Appalachian story teller, observed that West Virginia had the lowest crime rate in the country.

“That’s because we don’t have anything worth stealing!” she quipped.

The widespread poverty became evident to our team members as we fanned out to our respective work sites. While our residents were graciously welcoming, it was clear that most of them were living on the edge, with health problems and collection notices making it difficult for them to keep their homes in adequate repair.

Nearly all of our teams encountered an assortment of rotting wood, peeling paint, and mildewed walls. One of our team members worked on a house whose foundation was slowly falling down a hill.

My team worked at the home of a wonderfully faith-filled woman named Patricia. In addition to requiring extensive painting inside, her house needed to have its back porch torn down and rebuilt, as it was unsafe to walk out the back door. That was my part of the operation.

Patricia explained that a few years earlier, a neighbor’s phone call had awoken her one morning with the news that a bear was on her back porch. The creature spent the next several hours there, clawing away at the door (the ripped veneer was still dangling from the exterior), and finally crashing through the porch’s plywood floor.

Over the next five days, part of our team painted inside, and part worked on the deck out back. Each day at lunch time, Patricia would join us in group devotions where we reflected on passages from the Bible in light of our personal experiences. She shared with us some of her hardships, including her health problems and her job, which required her to keep an industrial fire burning overnight at a nearby factory - “tending the fires of hell” as she put it. But she also shared with us her deep faith in God’s providence, which had sustained her throughout her life.

At the end of the week, we all posed for a group picture on the new deck, and our team presented Patricia with a welcome mat and chair for her new porch. Our time together with Patricia had mutually strengthened our faith and renewed our spirit.

Other members of our Church team had similar experiences, parts of which we would share each night with the larger work camp and our own team. Those times were enriched with lively Christian music, thought-provoking video productions, and lots of group prayer.

Our thanks goes out to the entire congregation for all your prayers that week, as well as for your support of the team’s fundraising efforts throughout the year. On Sunday, September 24, members of the team will report back to the congregation some of their experiences at a forum held during the Sunday School hour.

I hope as many of you as possible will be able to attend this presentation, not only to receive our thanks, but also to extend your support to our young people as they begin to plan next year’s mission trip to upstate New York. This will be yet another chance for them to put into practice in a very real way those things about our faith we try to teach them on Sunday mornings. There is no greater gift that we as a congregation can give them as they learn to carry that faith forward into adulthood.