Mission Monday

Today was our first Mission Monday of the summer.  It was a great success!  The students shopped, made and delivered lunches to our local lifeguards on the beach.

There are two purposes to this event:
#1 is to share the love of Jesus Christ with each lifeguard in a practical way.  Inside the lunch bag was a note card from our youth group that read, "Lunch is on us!  We appreciate what you do."  We also included John 3:16 on the card.

#2 I wanted to use this event to start getting some of our students prepared for our 2015 mission trip.  I want students with leadership abilities to step up to the plate.  What better way to figure out who has those abilities than to give them a task and let them figure out how to accomplish the task.

We went to the grocery store.  I told the students how many we were feeding.  I also let them know what should be included in the bag.  I divided them into teams and let each team get something different for the lunch.  Including figuring up how many pounds of lunch meat to purchase at the deli.  They did a great job shopping.

Next we went back to the church and put all the groceries on the counter and I said, "figure out how you want to work together to assemble the sandwiches, bag them and pack the bags."  I then walked out and left them to do the job without checking on them or telling them what to do.  I could hear the leaders stepping up.

Next we loaded the sack lunches and drinks into the church van and headed out to hit each beach access that had lifeguards.  The students took turns in teams delivering the lunches and letting the lifeguards know who we were and to enjoy their free lunch.

Each lunch had either a ham or turkey sandwich, a salty chip type snack, a cookie snack, a Gatorade and bottle of ice water.  The lifeguards were very happy to have lunch delivered to them.  The students did a great job.  We wrapped it up by eating our lunch on the beach and swimming for a couple of hours.