Ashley Day: Awesome Mission Trip Experiences!!

Hey youth parents or friends!!! I just want to let you all know how awesome this week has been. Of course, that's not surprising-everything we do is so much fun. But I feel like this week the youth has gotten so much closer, both to each other and God, and serving the world. The first three day we were weeding, which did get a little frustrating at times. We sometimes complained that the weeds would just grow back, or after a while the trash we picked up would only reappear. But in the end we all came to realize that the people and the community needed this job done, and we were helping out the individual people so much. Yesterday was definitely my favorite though. We started out selling newspapers with the homeless people on the streets of Washington. That also got aggravating because of the amount of people that would just walk by and pretend to answer the phone or simply ignore us, or even give us mean looks. We didn't get very many people to buy our papers, but the ones that did made a huge difference in the people we were selling them for's lives.Later that day we went to an after school program called Little Friends for Peace, and we got to play with children that are being brought up in a rough and violent neighborhood. It was a wonderful thing to see the lovely smiles on all of their faces, and how attached they got to us in such a short amount of time. This whole week has been such a great experience and we all have such awesome memories now. Tonight at devotion we all realized how close our senior girls are to leaving, and there was definitely a lot of tears. We all love them so much and we're going to miss them on these awesome mission trips!! ASHLEY