CVCA has a service-focused club called Diakonos (Greek for “servant”). During the year, Diakonos helps out at a nursing home once a month, and helps at a woman’s shelter once a month. They collect the paper recycling bins during the school year. And, every year during spring break, the group sends a group of students out on service projects – sometimes Habitat for Humanity, sometimes other projects. It is headed up by my friend Craig, and he does a great job at stressing the need for service for Christians and the need for community for Christians. The spring break trip offers both, since the students live and work together for 5-6 days. This was my fifth year in helping with the trip.

Craig has wanted to plug students in to local ministries, and that, combined with the costs of staying other places, led Craig to make the choice to stay at CVCA this year, in the school. The facilities are excellent, and it was a central place to work with local ministries that needed help. This year, the students helped out at a school for autistic children, helped out an urban ministry in Akron, did some work with Habitat, helped out with a community garden at a local church, and also helped clean around CVCA itself. There was plenty of opportunity to be introduced to local ministries.

We started by gathering at CVCA last Monday. Most students were to be there at 4:00 in the afternoon, to set up camp, as it were. I got there early with a group of students in charge of each evening’s entertainment. We needed to run though a murder mystery play that Craig had heavily modified to be bizarre – it featured the Easter Bunny as the main detective, and the suspects were Mr. and Mrs. Claus, Little Bo Peep, Aladdin, “Parry Hotter,” and Cinderella. We were going to perform the play (using scripts – no memorization) on Thursday, so we needed at least one full run-through (and we eventually got in two run-throughs).

The run-through took about an hour. We then joined up with students in the CVCA library, which became our common room for the week. Some students were needed to help set up for supper, and the rest were free to do as they liked. I was able to play a couple of games with students, including backgammon, which I had not played in 15+ years.

We then went down to the cafeteria for supper. We had chicken soup and fresh bread, which was quite good. We had a good time, and a room full of students is a lively thing. We had 29 students and 7 adults, plus Craig’s family, who joined us for supper, so it was certainly an interesting gathering.

After supper, we had the evening entertainment, which was playing Sardines. Sardines is hide-and-seek, but when you find the person who is hiding, you join him or her. I needed to run to my office before beginning my search because I needed some batteries for a camera. I laughed to myself on the way to my office, and Dubbs and another teacher, Miss Williams, overheard me and wanted to know what was so funny. I jokingly mentioned we could use the security camera monitor in my office to see where the hiding girl was hiding. They latched on to the idea, and the humor of it outweighed the fact that we were cheating. Needless to say, we found the girl with very little effort, but we were not the first there – there were already several students crouching behind lab benches. We joined them, and others trickled in over the next few minutes. After about 15 minutes of waiting, there were still two groups of about 8 students that had not found us, so I decided to help. I went back to my office, fired up the security cameras, activated the PA system, and announced to startled students if they were getting “hotter” or “colder.” It was great. What made it even better was that, unbeknownst to me, the students hiding in the room I’d left had decided to move to another room, so I was actually directing the remaining students to the wrong room. It was a good time.

After the game was done, we gathered back in the common room, and Craig had us break into small groups, which was new this year. I was assigned to a group with four students, three of whom I knew. They are good guys. The point of the small groups was to be able to discuss what Craig was stressing during the worship time of the week – that history and spiritual life was broken into four segments – creation/perfection, the Fall, Jesus being crucified, and the restoration that Jesus started – Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration. We were to informally discuss the idea of the evening in our small groups. The first night we met before Craig spoke, and we prayed about God’s attributes (goodness, holiness, love, etc.), which are different from what he has done for us.

After small groups, we went sang songs together. Sadly, I had been fighting a migraine for several hours, and I finally had to come home and go to bed – my head hurt a lot, and it was beginning to make my stomach upset. Since I was so close to CVCA, Craig had graciously offered to let me sleep in my own bed each night. So, the plan worked out that I would be at CVCA from about 8:00 am to about 11:00 pm, but then I could come home to sleep. That certainly helped me get more rest than I would have sleeping on the floor of a classroom.

Anyway, I missed Craig speaking on the creation story, and how God wanted that perfect environment for us, and that we have a sense that things are meant to be better than they are now. Craig referred to this phase as “ought” – how things ought to have been were it not for the Fall.

In the meantime, I got home and went right to bed and fell asleep after an hour or so of tossing and turning. The night’s sleep fixed my headache, as sleeping always seems to. That made for a good start on Tuesday, the first day of work “in the field.”