Ok so this blog may bounce around and be everywhere but I'll try to edit it and make it so you can understand.
So not many of you that read this know, but over spring break I went to Denver, Colorado on a mission trip with my church here. It was the best week ever and I really want to share my experiences with y'all, and also reflect on them myself.
So first of all I signed up for this trip on a whim, I just felt like God really wanted me to go there, but more I felt like I really wanted to go see mountains and be around nature and everything like that. Well not only did God give me that but he gave me sooo much more than I ever would have thought.
The trip was an all girls trip, 14 girls, and we met a couple times before the trip but really I didn't know anyone. It's amazing how God can take 14 girls with very different backgrounds and personalities and turn us into a super close group of friends. You could say that we started our trip on Friday because we met at our leaders house to pack the van and get things done so we could just leave in the morning, at 5 am. We were given a strict packing list because everything we brought, all of our backpacking gear, clothes, and everything else, had to fit in a 15 passenger van, remember that there's 14 of us. Yeah, well it was only by the grace of God that all of our stuff fit into this van. Foam sleeping pads were shoved under the seats along with everyone's backpacks, clothes were rolled and stuffed into ziploc bags which were then shoved into any crevice that we could find, boots were stuffed between the backdoor and the backseat, and we sat on top of the sleeping bags, and everything else miraculously found a spot somewhere in the van. And we rode in this van for 25 hours to get to Denver.
I'm pretty used to long car rides, we always drove from Virginia to Michigan and that's about 13 hours, and it took us 18 hours when we moved here, but never have I done anything more than that and definitely never in a squished 15 passenger van. But this van ride was awesome! Being squished and forced into this close space allowed all of us bond and get to know each other a little. I struck up a conversation with one of the girls and it was really cool how God definitely but her there for me. We talked about how we were excited for whatever we were gonna do in Denver and somehow we ended up talking about camps and things like that. She works at this camp called Peak for children during the summer and a softball camp and some other things too, our conversation sparked my interest for possibly working at Camp Barakel, a camp I always went to as a kid, but more on that later.
Our leaders decided that they didn't want to tell us anything about our plans for the week so that we wouldn't have expectations that would then be broken and so that we would learn patience and to trust that they and God had a plan. So after lunch we looked around and realized that we were in the country and headed to who knows where and all we could do was trust that our leaders had a plan. Well they ended up taking us to this park, after getting lost a couple times, and told us to grab a pen and put our hiking boots on. Turns out they had planned this mini escapade to introduce us to hiking in snow and then we got to sing a couple worship songs. They then gave us a card and told us to find a quiet place and write a letter to ourselves getting out all of our fears for the week and writing down what we wanted to get out of the week. It was definitely an awesome way to start our week and get in the right mindset.
When we stopped for dinner at Wendy's it came up that my Dad worked for the government but that I didn't really know what he did, and it was decided that he must be in the C.I.A and that he was riding under our van protecting us. His name became Dale Tackman because if we gave him a lie detector test he would put a tack in his shoe to control his heart rate and therefore change the results. In a car full of 14 tired girls stories get a little crazy, and this one just kept expanding, it was quite hilarious.
Later on around 10 or something we stopped at a gas station and took our potty breaks. We ended up striking conversation with the guy who was working at the counter. He obviously was surprised that a van full of girls was getting gas at 10 at night and so we told him that we were on a spring break trip with our church and that we were headed to Denver and he was amazed that we were doing that and it just seemed to really brighten his night and he just kept joking around with us and stuff. We headed back to the van but then someone decided it would be a really good idea to throw on the cupid shuffle, so there we were 14 girls dancing to the cupid shuffle in the middle of a gas station while the clerk watched and laughed from the window. Funniest thing of the day for sure, and definitely a good break from driving.
We finally arrived in Denver at 4 am and found out that we would be staying at Colorado Christian University, which meant we would be living in these apartment style dorms with a comfy bed, cozy shower, and our own kitchen. I was fully expecting that we would probably be sleeping at a church or a hotel, definitely nothing this nice. We had 3 dorms so each had 5 people in it and wouldn't you guess I was paired with the girl that sparked my interest in Barakel, way to work that out God! We then slept until 10 the next day which was awesome because I only slept maybe an hour in the van.
So now it's Sunday March 7th and the first thing we need to do is get groceries so we have food to eat. We found King Sooper's, a really super grocery store ;) and we split up into groups to get different things that we needed for the week. It was fun and cool to see how God provided for us by giving us cheap products and coupons and even salespeople that allowed us to use a discount card to get even more savings! Hooray for that.
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