Rob O's Sermon (St. Paul's, WC)

Our trip to Biloxi was life-changing and heart-warming, but I’m not going to lie; we had our fair share of drama on this trip, that’s just what happens when you put 30 teenagers together for an extended period of time.

There were times when youth felt disrespected and ignored by other youth, and some didn’t know what to do with these emotions, until it was too much for them to handle, and they had to let it all out. Paul says “Let no evil come out of your mouths.” But from time to time, again, I’m not going to lie, a few choice phrases, what my mother would call “bad words” and probably what Paul would consider “evil” escaped from more than a few mouths.

On this trip, though, we did help each other out. It helped to vent. Often when someone else voiced the frustration I was feeling, it took the edge off my own. I think it put us all in a better mood and a more receptive mood, where we could help each other out. Out of these same mouths would come good words. We would talk over our problems to other youth and put our own emotions and feelings on hold for someone else’s benefit. This helped us in turn, to turn outward, to focus on the problems of others (other youth and others in the community we were staying in), and to help them out.

On the second day of work, we were told that we would be tilling a lawn and then raking out all of the loose grass and vegetation. It sounded like very tedious and boring work, but we tried to keep an open mind as we drove out to where we would be working. The first thing I noticed when we got there was that it was a very nice neighborhood, many of the houses were the same size or bigger than the ones in Walnut Creek, and except for the lack of grass the homes appeared to be completely unaffected by the hurricane. I wasn’t the only one who noticed either, many of my friends were complaining saying thing like, “we might as well be mowing lawns in Beverly Hills”. So it was clear that from the start that not a lot of people felt very passionate about our new job assignment. The general grumbling, after a morning simmering in the sun, turned into a dull persistent buzz of discontent. The work was getting done very slowly, due mainly to all the complaining. Instead of raking, people were standing around and talking about how they didn’t want to be there. After four hours of accomplishing only a circle of tilled dirt, we went back to Camp Biloxi. Back at camp, the venting continued, but this time a few adults and other youth made some statements that changed everybody’s perspective. “We don’t know these people or their circumstances. Maybe there is a real need for what we are doing here.” “If we complain less, the work will get done faster.” “If you don’t want to be here, work hard, get the work done, and we’ll move on to someplace else.”

We realized that we shouldn’t question what work we are doing or what work needs to be done. That’s not why we went there. We should, as Paul put it in Ephesians 4:25: “Let no evil come out of our mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need….”. So, we went back to work tilling the lawn. Very few people complained and the work got done a lot faster. By lunch time the entire lawn was tilled, front and back.

When we helped each other with the work, as well as mentally and emotionally, we were able to grow more cohesive as a community, get more done, and have a better mindset about what we were doing, The experience, even the struggles we worked though, strengthened our faith in each other and our belief that what we were doing together was for good.

The experiences I had during the ten days on the Mission Trip taught me the following:

We are stronger when we work together. We are stronger when we use our words to build each other up. We are stronger when we trust that what we are doing together is good. And, together and strong, we can do a lot of good for others. Good that could be uplifting, even life-changing for those we helped in Biloxi, and also for us.