A Story from South Dakota...

While in South Dakota I shared about how mission trips with kids and teens are really about all the teachable moments that arise during them! Here's a cool story about one of these moments while I was in South Dakota.

On Friday, we arrived in White Clay, Nebraska and immediately got to work on several different tasks. I found myself and two teens in a garden. Now, let's take a sideroad for a moment...below is the "garden" I thought we were going to be weeding with hoes...

...it looked like a small, bordered garden - between the three of us I thought surely we could have this finished and looking nice in about an hour's time - that was until Bruce, the 555 Ministry Leader kept walking...right past the "garden"!

And walking, and walking, and walking ... until our view opened up to this...

THE REAL GARDEN! At this point I was thinking about how much harder the task ahead had just become, but we got to work and began weeding the garden row by row - taking a quick break each time we would complete a row! About the third row in I heard one of the teens say..."I hate weeds, why do we have to have them anyway?" Well, this led to a conversation about Adam and Eve, Creation, Sin, the things that changed when sin entered the world, and about Heaven and being restored with Christ. Questions abounded and conversation went on and on as we talked about these things all because of a simple garden, overrun with weeds. Even in the midst of all the hard work I know that I will never look at a garden overrun with weeds the same again, nor will these teens. Forever I, and hopefully they too, will see a weedy garden as a result of sin coming into the world and our separation from Christ, which can only be restored through our relationship with Him.

To today's generation hands on experience means so much more than reading something in a book or hearing it - obviously the teens I was with didn't remember that weeds and toilsome work were because sin entered the world, but through their experience and conversation in the garden that day, I'm not sure they'll ever forget the lesson they learned!