Saturday, April 4th was the start of spring break for me and Meredith. This year I was going to spend my break by going with about 30 CVCA students and chaperons on a service trip. Our service group at school (Diakonos) goes on a service trip every year during spring break, and this was my fourth year of tagging along.

I started the day fairly early by taking Mer to the Cleveland airport. She was going to fly down to Orlando to see her parents, and she was kind enough to book her tickets so they matched up with how long I was going to be gone (Saturday-Thursday evening). That would give us Friday-Monday (we had Easter Monday off) in order to have a mini-break together.

At about 8:15, I got back to CVCA, where the Diakonos group was meeting. Usually we go out of state (one year to Pennsylvania and two years to Michigan), but due to changes in state laws that made it difficult to go out of state, the decision was made to stay fairly local this year. As such, instead of using the first day to travel to the location, this year we were able to meet at CVCA, divide into several groups, and head off to various work sites right away. We split into three teams – one team went to a Habitat for Humanity work site to help out with spreading  gravel for a foundation. That work only took a few hours, so they then headed back to CVCA to do garbage clean-up around campus, which was very nice of them. The second team went to a homeless shelter/soup kitchen and spent the day serving food and cleaning around the shelter and kitchen. My group went to the church of one of the trip leaders (Nate’s church) to help them out with a community work day. Basically, the church was making itself available to do work for anyone who had need. The church was also serving a pancake breakfast, so the kids got a nice meal to start things off. On the job front, some of the projects had to be put on hold – it was a cold and overcast day (at least at the start), so the car-washing team had to give up on that idea. Our CVCA kids were mixed in with the local church members and sent off to various job sites of yard work and such. Nate and I were assigned to help an older woman clean out her gutters. Her house was only a block or so from the church, so we headed up there. It turns out her gutters were in very good shape. There were a few leaves and seed pods (the “helicopter” seeds) that had to be cleaned out, and I scraped out some roofing asphalt muck from around the downspouts. The lady was a widow, and super nice. I think she was lonely, and she spent a good deal of the time talking with Nate. She also insisted on paying us, so we gave her money over to the church to be used to buy food for people in need. All in all, cleaning her gutters only took a few minutes, but we talked with her for a fair amount, and headed back to the church after about an hour or so.

We then headed over to the big job site of the day – as they finished their first jobs, the church groups were all meeting at a local baseball field to clean it up and do some painting. At the park, we raked leaves, cleaned up trash, trimmed back brush, scraped and painted bleachers, and trimmed and mowed grass. There was a Little League practice going on, and the sun started to poke through the clouds, so the day was quite pleasant. I tried to keep busy by scraping and painting, but soon there were more hands than work, so I puttered with leaf and stick clean-up. Craig (the trip’s leader) has stressed that we should allow the kids to serve, and sometimes that means adults backing off work when there are more workers than jobs. That is wise too, in that I get tired faster than the kids do, so it “saves me” for future work days. It is still hard to admit that I can’t keep up with 17- and 18-year-olds, but that is the truth.

The church sent over some folks with a hot-dog-and-chips lunch, and we kept working until we had the place looking pretty decent. Nate had been mowing, but was asked to stop by a coach who was trying to run a practice, so we packed things up at about 2:00. We sent a few of the kids ahead with Nate’s wife (Rachel) to start getting the evening meal ready, and the rest of us went back to Nate’s church to do some clean-up around the church grounds. 

After we finished at the church, the kids piled into Nate’s van, and I got into my trusty hatchback, and we headed off to go to “the Tavern.” The Tavern is an old-fashioned-style tavern that a friend of Nate’s built. The Tavern has no heat except for a fireplace and a stove, it is lit by kerosene lanterns, and it is pretty darn cool. It has a small kitchen outbuilding where Rachel and the students were busy at work getting supper ready over a large kitchen fire. Rachel is an amazing cook, but I was impressed – it cannot be fun to try to get food ready for 30 people when you have to rely on fireplaces and woodstoves. She pulled it off nicely, though. She made a large cauldron of ham soup, and corn bread, and potatoes. We always eat well on these trips.

The students who had come with us roamed around the woods of the Tavern, and I took the time to call Dale and Carlene to make sure Mer had arrived safely. She had, and was in fact out with her father on a spa date to get a pedicure.

Nate and I then took my car over to where we would actually be staying for the week – Camp Carl. Camp Carl is a Christian camp run by the Chapel in Akron, and it is a huge camp with hundreds of acres of woods and trails. We went back there to touch base with the rest of the Diakonos team, and to then lead them back the short (but hard to find) distance to the Tavern. We all made it just fine, and the new arrivals were deeply impressed by the Tavern.

We spent a bit of time then until supper chatting and exploring. Supper was served, to great acclaim, and then we played games for about an hour while the clean-up crew took care of the supper things. Once everyone was back in the Tavern itself, we had a time of worship where we sang three song (two of which we did a cappella, which was very nice).

Craig then spoke for a short while on Romans 12:1-2:  “I beseech you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, in order to prove by you what is that good and pleasing and perfect will of God.”

Craig pointed out that Romans 12 has come after Paul has used 11 chapters to state the case of how sin has separated us from God and then how God’s great mercy brings us back to him. As such, everything we do should be motivated by the great mercy of God. The message of Romans 12 is to Christians (as opposed to everyone in the world), and it tells us how we should be and behave. We should not be molded (conformed) to the standards of the world. We should stick out and appear to be odd. God’s mercy demands all of us – there are no part-time Christians; there are no 10% Christians. It is an all-or-nothing proposition. There is no room to live in the world by the world’s standards and rules, and then “tack on” a little Christianity to make us feel better.

We then cleaned up the Tavern and headed back to Camp Carl at about 10:00. The main building of the camp was in use by a group of college girls for Saturday night only, so we were staying in the outlying cabins. When I got to the boys’ cabin, the bunks were mostly full, and the offer was made that Nate and I could stay in one of the camp’s apartments. I gladly accepted, and Nate and I headed over to the apartment. There was one bed, but since I had brought my air mattress, I let Nate have the bed. We were quickly in bed and asleep (although Nate talked in his sleep a little – I think it was about track, which he helps coach).

I discovered in getting ready for bed that I had a mild sunburn on my neck. Pasty white Maine boy managed to get a sunburn on a 40-degree day. That is impressive! I had a pretty good sleep, although I did have to get up during the night to turn up the heat. Otherwise, it was a quiet night, and a good day.