We are here! Hello Bethel Baptist Church! Thank goodness the rain held off while we unloaded our luggage. Bethel Baptist is a church that was once a Bowling Alley! We are thankful for them to have such a cool place for our lodging.
Time is moving fast as we have a Pizza Dinner with other PELICANS and get prepared with a meeting from all of our cool, hip and fabulous staff. Church is on the agenda for tonight at Memorial Highway Baptist and we can not wait! We are so ready for what God has planned for us this week.

Last night we went to service at Memorial Baptist. We found out that Memorial Baptist is a Haitian church and the service was in French Creole!! We couldn't understand most of the service, but that didn't keep us from enjoying it. God shows up no matter what language is being spoken. By the time it was over the day had started catching up with us and we were ready for bed.

We had our first PPM meeting last night with our trip leader Amanda and our assistant trip leader Marci. After that it was time for bed. Sleeping in a converted bowling alley was pretty cool and they even have 2 working lanes! Our team was in charge of setting up for breakfast and we had it ready to go by 7:00 a.m. I think it is going to be great working with the New Hope Baptist Church group.

As soon as breakfast was over the PPM staff gave us our first opportunity to minister to our host church, Bethel Baptist. We spent the morning cleaning up the church where we are staying. WOW, what a bunch of servants are here this week! We all jumped and grabbed the closest cleaning tool. We swept, mopped, dusted, vacuumed, cleaned bathrooms, picked up trash inside and out, and cleaned the church in record time! We had it done so quickly that the staff was scrambling to give us things to clean! We are all so excited to get to know the other team from New Hope Baptist Church of Parish, Florida this week, but more importantly we can’t wait to see how God is going to use us and move in our lives. It’s going to be an AMAZING week!

We spent the rest of the morning helping Memorial Baptist clear out some brush that has been cut down. We also folded some REALLY big (and heavy too) tent-tarps! And it isn’t even lunch time!

We had such a great first day of VBS on Monday. The weather was perfect and the kids really seemed to enjoy the lessons & love making cars. The team is so excited to see the final car races on Friday. It is going to be so cool to how the race cars progress from day to day. Kickball was awesome! We got dog piled, chased, tackled, and overall had a super terrific time. Our day ended with an outing to Bayside where we had a dinner with our group and got the chance to see a little bit of Miami. The Miami Heat was having their victory rally all day and their stadium is right there where we were. When we arrived back at Bethel we had our team meeting with the PPM staff and it was pretty terrific and we continued to really get to know the other youth group we are serving with. God is so awesome…we may be two separate youth groups, but God has totally bonded us together as one group. The PPM staff can’t even tell us apart anymore! ? What an amazing day, but bed couldn’t come soon enough.

We had such a terrific day!

Last night was terrific! We spent the evening with Parkway Baptist Church. They cooked us an authentic Jamaican meal complete with jerk chicken, rice, and beans. It was the most delicious thing we've ever had! After that we had a youth service with their youth. We sang praise and worship songs, several people of our group gave their testimony, and one of the youth leaders gave the most awesome talk. We also had a PPM training on how to tell our story and then we broke into groups of two and told each other our story. It was so awesome!

Today we split from New Hope for our morning projects. We came to His House Orphanage to help the staff go through donations from the Pepsi Company. There was a lot of office supplies that we helped organize and then we loaded the rest in a truck to be delivered to a large warehouse. It didn’t take us long to finish that and then we were off to the warehouse to unload everything we just loaded. When we got back to the orphanage we still had a couple of hours before lunch so we broke into groups. 2 groups went to the homes and helped the house parents clean and the other group picked up debris left on the property compliments of Betty ? A couple of us got to hear a really cool story about how God designed and led a couple to be house parents. What an amazing story of God's purpose and plan for our lives...even when we don't have a clue as to what He is doing. Before we knew it it was time to head back to Memorial and meet up with New Hope for afternoon VBS and water fun! Thank goodness because it’s been a hot day!

Right now we are outside playing in the water! Fruit basket toss up with quite the slippery twist! Imagine this...large sheet of plastic, 20 chairs lined up around the perimeter, a water hose, baby shampoo, and lots of kids. Yep...it's fun in the sun time!!!

Tonight we are headed to an authentic Haitian dinner at a local restaurant. It's going to be DELICIOUS!!

VBS has been going awesome and it is so cool to see how God has been not only working on our hearts, but the hearts of all the kids too.

Wow! That’s about all that can be said for the last 2 days of our trip.

Thursday was great! We spent the day working on projects at Chapman Homeless Shelter and at Bethel. New Hope spent the morning painting at Chapman and Lexington spent the morning ripping carpet off of walls at Bethel. We totally rocked the projects!! We were done in record time and were ready to head to the beach for our “play” day.

We arrived at the beach and we couldn’t get into the water fast enough! It has been SO hot in Miami and the ocean breeze and cool water felt like heaven! It was a totally perfect day to spend at the beach. We had dinner at this totally cool place called the Taco Shack. After dinner we headed back down to the beach for our beach service. Talk about God showing up! The awesomeness of the sunset, ocean waves, and beauty of the sky reminded us of the greatness of our God. The moments of scripture reading by the PPM Staff, prayer for our churches, and our God moments were some of the best this week! We were energized for our last day of missions.

Friday dawned warm and beautiful. The PPM staff told us it was going to be a long day and they were right! We all headed to Memorial to begin/finish the repairs on the shipping container. We had the roof tarred and metal sheets screwed in before lunch. The rest of us helped clear out some more of the field and put items back into the container.

After lunch it was time for the races! New Hope’s expertise in Pinewood Derby racing was a HIT with the VBS kids! We had worked on them all week designing, painting, getting the axles and wheels on, to running test races. We raced each other and had so much fun with the friendly competition. 5 ‘clock came quickly and it was time to pack all the VBS stuff up and head back to Bethel to shower and change for the VBS celebration and Haitian meal at Memorial that evening.

The VBS celebration was fantastic. We teamed up with the group from the morning for the celebration and the kids were in for quite a celebration! We sang and danced, there were skits, and Pastor David Eugene led an alter call and 6 people accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior!!! Praise God! He is such an amazing God and we are so blessed to have been his hands and feet this week. What an honor it has been to be chosen by Him to hang out not only with each other, but also with the children at Memorial, the people at the homeless shelter, the other teams at Bethel, and the PPM staff!

The church service was on “Haitian” time and ended around 10-something. After we said our goodbyes to everyone at Memorial we headed back to Bethel for our last PPM team meeting. We were all tired and ready to head to bed, but the staff had other things planned for us. Needless to say it was totally worth the wait. We spent at least an hour reviewing the God moments of the last week, affirming each other, and letting PPM know what this week meant to us. It’s a wonderful thing when we can get out of our own way so God can step in and create moments for us that we will treasure forever. Sure it was late and we were tired, but God infused our tired bodies with his strength and energy and created some fantastic “God” moments that we will treasure forever.