Children of Promise

In January, I joined a mission/outreach team at PC, and we began brainstorming for ways that we could get our singles group more involved in service. So for the past several months, about 8 of us have been planning a weekend of “48 Hours of Prayer and Service”, each taking a different activity to be in charge of. We ended up calling the weekend Children of Promise, based on Gal. 4:28, since the dates occurred over April 28th. And so, here’s a bit of a recap on our activities. It was our hope that everyone would choose at least one activity to be apart of as well as sign up for an hour of prayer time. We were overwhelmed with the success of the endeavor and as always were equally as blessed as those we served.

Prayertime
• Had 48 1-hour blocks of time for people to sign up for. Each hour someone else took up the constant prayertime. We set up an online blog for people to journal in as well (www.b1pc.blogspot.com). Neatest part about this was that the night hours filled up first on our sign-up sheet. Pretty cool to think that at anytime during the weekend someone was praying for our group, our church, and people that needed to be shown the love of God this weekend.

Friday Night: Dinner/Movie
• About 15 of us split up into 3 groups and went out to restaurants to eat. We chose another table in the restaurant randomly and picked up their tab for dinner. I had a really fun group: Wes, Brock, and Victoria and enjoyed the interaction with not one waitress, but about 4! Their reactions to our request for another table’s bill were really great. Ended the night with watching End of the Spear back up at the church. Recommend this movie about missionaries in the Amazon jungle, but as Katie warned us beforehand, “there are bottoms in this movie!” There’s your warning.

Saturday Morning: Manual Labor
• Met at 8 and journeyed to the Colony area to sort through items at a resale (goodwill type) store. Others went to various homes that needed some chores and yardwork done. Amber and I left early and met Bobby at Sam’s to pick up the food for the following….

Saturday Afternoon: Homeless Ministry
• Peanut butter jelly time!!! 30+ people showed up for this activity that I headed up. We made 100 sack lunches, assembly line style, of PBJ’s, chips, and oreos. Then we split up into groups of 5-6, went to downtown areas, and passed out socks, crackers, and granola bars to people on the streets. Such great experiences from this! My group encountered several individuals, one of whom happened to have his socks stolen the previous night. Coincidence? I don’t think so! Anyway, turned out much better than I hoped. It’s hard to plan for something like this where you don’t know what it’s really going to look like or what exactly you’ll be doing. Just had to tell people to show up and go see what happened, to go where they were led. And we did just that.

Saturday Night: FriendSpeak Potluck
• BBQ/Texas themed potluck for international students who have been working on their English skills with some of our group. Enjoyed some fun games and visits from Cowboy Eric and Cowgirl Katie as they acted out stories we had written. And how good was that blackberry cobbler!

Saterday Night… later
• One of the best parts of the weekend… Bobby and I delivered the 100 sack lunches we fixed earlier to a homeless shelter downtown. (www.austinstreet.org) Very, very cool place. All the shelters I’ve been to have limited space and dorm style rooms. This place was a huge warehouse, divided into men/women by a cinderblock wall. We walked in and there were literally hundreds of cots laid out side by side, all full. This is the only free shelter in Dallas and has plenty of room for all the homeless people currently in the area. Supported by the Mavs, this place puts on some really neat events that we’re hoping to get involved with soon.

Sunday Morning: Sweetheart’s Banquet
• Hosted a special banquet for some older single women in the church. Didn’t get to participate in this one, but enjoyed a few hours of rest instead!

Sunday Night: Recap and Wrap-up
• Reported on the weekend to the congregation through members of a panel from our mission planning team. Wrapped up the weekend with a devo, pizza, and planning time for future involvement in these ministries.

So how many things can you pack into one weekend? We certainly stretched the limits on this one. All were quite exhausted, but the good kind of tired where after a good night’s sleep, you’re ready to wake up and do it all over again.