Cinci: April 25-27, 2008

Hey guys,
We took a trip to Cinci this past weekend (April 25-27), and it was incredible! To be completely honest, it was one of my favorite trips to date. We had an 8-person team on this trip. Matt Sellers and I were leading our very first trip, and Christy Gifford came and gave some much needed support on the leadership front, and we had 3 returning mandate-ers: Bobby Rhea, Kenta Gumbert, and the one and only Jenny Marshall. We also had 2 new-comers: Jess Beck and Kathy Kanagy. We were at Covenant Church of the Nazarene in Northside Cincinnati. On Friday night we arrived at the church and met Abe and Joni, and got settled into the church. The building itself is an old bar (which we all thought was really neat), and the sanctuary in the next room was full of recycled couches arranged in a circle instead of pews. We had a "briefing" (as opposed to debriefing) and played Table Topics and got to know everyone in the group and talk about what we anticipated for the rest of the weekend.
Abe met us at the church at 9:00 on Saturday morning and took us to the home of a woman in the church who needed some painting and minor repairs inside her apartment. After lunch we went to the house of another lady who needed her porch painted. When we were done, Abe, Joni, and our whole group took a cooler full of popsicles and went to the park and walked around the neighborhood passing them out to people we met along the way. A lot of the people were also people who attended the church. Personally, I thought that was a really cool thing that a lot of people wouldn't even think about doing anymore; just walking around and talking to people, giving of what we have. It just reminded me that we don't need programs and formal organizations to just share the love of Jesus with the people around us.
On Saturday night, we went to Abe and Joni's house for dinner. We cooked our famous Mandate Spaghetti. :) Later, they took us to Cliffton Ave. for coffee. After that we all just walked around Cliffton for a couple of hours before heading back to the church.
We had a church service on Sunday morning. I rode with Joni to pick up people in the church's new blue church van! Yeah! Driving around Cinci, you see a lot of abrupt changes in demographics in the different areas. I've also noticed this in a lot of other cities too. You could be driving down a street where drugs are sold and parents can't afford to feed their kids everyday, and then you turn the corner or cross a bridge and find expensive town houses with manicured lawns. It's kind of frustrating to me, and it makes me wonder how much these people actually interact with each other. I wonder how I would respond if I lived in either location. How much do we really notice hurting people in our own neighborhoods?
We met some really awesome people on Sunday morning. Valerie was a homeless woman who had been trying to break a drug addiction, and on Sunday she had been clean for 64 days. We saw a lot of the same people we had seen Saturday handing out popsicles. After church we cleaned the church and hung out with some of the kids before we got in the van for the 3 hour drive back to MVNU...significantly shorter if the van is being driven by Matt Sellers. :)

Much love to you all, and thank you for your prayers!
Rachel

I know the LORD is always with me. I will not be shaken, for he is right beside me.
Acts 2:25