We started out our journey today just before noon.  Normally, you can expect a trip in church vans to be kinda rowdy all the way to your destination.  But today we realized that that rule only applies on trips about 3-4 hours.  When students know they’re gonna be driving all day just to get half way across the country, a calmness comes over them…and we like that.

We stopped for two meals today, and for gas a couple times too.  Already, we can tell that most of the students are opening up to others on the trip that they might not have known too well before we left.  Since it was our first leg of the trip, we split the vans up into the small groups we’ve been meeting with in the weeks leading up to now.
Tonight, we had an evening meeting where we all talked about how this group really made an effort to stick to the covenant we made at the church before we left - a commitment to foster loving & inclusive relationships with the others on the team.

Seth took turns riding in each van, and put in a message that he downloaded from Don Miller (Author: Blue Like Jazz) where he talked about the concept of having God write your story.  It was a great message that we all kind of revisited later on tonight in our meeting.  Tomorrow, students will hopefully start their morning writing in their journals about what kind of things they’d want God to include if He were writing the story for how this week will go.  And what kinds of things can we do so that we are the kind of characters that God wants in His story?

If you’re able to join us on this site, please also join us in prayer that God breathes His hopes into our hearts.  And that if we came with any expectations for this time that are less ambitious than God’s high hopes for us, that ours would melt away, making room for Him to act in our lives.

SETH KEEPS WATCH WHILE THE GIRLS PICK OUT THEIR SPOTS ON THE CHURCH FLOOR HERE IN ST. LOUIS