no title would do this justice

This is a retelling of the events that took place on a KU Campus Crusade trip to Minden, LA to help with hurricane relief stuff. Specifically from group 2--the Dream Team. I'll just warn you, it's a little long. But at least there's pictures.

This past weekend was one of my most favorites ever, and I don’t even understand why. Maybe God just wanted to bless us for taking a step of faith. Things were awesome, a little weird, ok maybe really weird, but way flippin’ sweet.

At 10pm Thursday, we joined up in our 12-car caravan and started heading to our final destination of Minden. My car consisted of the following:
-My little bff and entertainment Emily Ashcraft
-The lovely Miss Katie Dennis, who I have only known for less than a month.
-Lucas Thompson, who before this trip was just some kid I didn’t really know but seemed nice and normal...my how that would change.
-Scooby Doo fruit snacks and dark chocolate m 'n ms
-An incredible assortment of CDs everywhere from Bone Thugs to Taking Back Sunday to the Lion King soundtrack


our car. you can tell how huge i am by the look on luke's face. 

Ok moving on. So we head out. It’s September 15. We stop at midnight on the 16th at a little rest stop to celebrate my 23rd birthday. Emily gave me this sweet book thing, Jen and Danielle sang and hardcore screamed Happy Birthday to me, Alan kissed me, you know, normal birthday things.

So at 1isham, we roll into Blackwell, OK to stay the night in Brenda Brown’s hometown church. Jen, Danielle, Katie, Emily and I slept in the nursery. I slept in a crib. It seemed to be the only appropriate way to celebrate my birth.

We head out on the road after a stellar breakfast and listening to this dude’s testimony from the church. I’m not gonna get into it here, but let’s just say some of us were a little confused after that. And no, it’s not because I was sleeping during it, because I wasn’t. Jerks.

Lucas drove us all the way to Minden that day, and I discovered that kid is freaking crazy.


deacon lucas 

Things got a little out of hand in the car. Lucas hates us girls’ music, and when he finally let us listen to a little Taking Back Sunday goodness, he almost hit a car in front of us. So he got all annoyed and was like, we have to change the cd. Katie, being the good motherly/best friend/wife figure to him calmed him down and put in a new cd. So we survived that situation. Barely.

We finally arrived in Minden at around 6pm Friday, where we immediately divided up our stuff, said some good-byes, and split up into our 3 groups for the weekend. My group headed over to the warehouse where we would spend most of our weekend.


dustin strutting his stuff to the warehouse 

The warehouse was an old Wal-Mart building that was turned into a Good Will type store for the hurricane victims. That night we just did a few things in the store before heading back to eat pizza at the missionary office house that would be our home for the next two nights.

Suddenly Emily, Katie and I were left to fend for ourselves in a little house with 13 boys.

Things stayed pretty normal that night. Although that word normal I only use relatively compared to the next night. We had a little worship service where Pat Downes played us some music, and I, Pastor Tate and the mother of this group, gave a little “sermon” as Emily called it. It was cool. We got all focused on the reason we were there: to be a huge B...lessing to people. No but seriously, we knew God wanted us there for a reason and that we just needed to rely on Him and do whatever He wanted us to do. For our group, that just meant sorting through a huge pile of clothes and shoes, but we did that work for God, so it was tight.

Oh yeah, so my birthday was way good. Even though I spent most of it in a car, it was great. I mean come on, I went to 4 different states, slept in a crib, worshipped God, hung out with my friends, laughed a lot at everything, played with balloon animals, talked to all my best friends and family on the phone, it was da bomb.


emily getting eaten 

Back to the story. We arrived at the warehouse at around 9:30am Saturday. We immediately met our good (and a little odd) friend, Jay. Jay told us there were two rules about the warehouse:
1. We’re volunteers so we can’t get fired.
2. Everything in the store is the same price. (Free).
So Jay set the boys to work on what the staff there called the Mountain. It was a huge pile of trash bags of clothes.


the mountain 

Let me just say right here that if anyone reading this still wants to help with the hurricane relief, don’t send clothes. They have more than plenty. They more need things like toiletries and stuff. And also, if you ever decide to donate clothes in the future, make sure they’re clean and would actually be worn in the 21st century. Some of the donated stuff was unbelievably gross and unattractive. I mean it was entertaining for us to try on, but also weird and unhelpful.


lucas in a tube top and me being a mom 

Then there was the girls’ job. Shoe sorting. We sorted through and put sizes on hundreds of pairs of women’s shoes. And let me tell you, those shoes were dirty. At one point we were joined by a sweet other girl named Emily also. And we pretty much just freaked her out with our conversation about a certain other person on the trip. Oops. She stayed with us about 15 minutes and then we never really saw her again. But let's be honest, any conversation had between Emily, Katie, and I would scare a conservative 17-year-old homeschooled girl.


our beautiful display of women's shoes 

So anyway, by the end of the day, it felt like we had been there for a week. I just remember standing at this cart of shoes at the end of the day, trying to figure out what the crap to do with them, and meanwhile 9-year-old Abby is standing behind us beat-boxing into a toy voice distorter machine. We pretty much lost it. That's when I think we realized it was time to go.

Saturday night.

Justin says this is the night when everyone got weird. Because I don't really know who will read this, I can't go into much detail. But I'll just say the night involved Lucas turning his huge CRU t-shirt into a toga and dancing around the kitchen, Dustin giving marriage counseling to several different people in the pastor's office, Justin explaining to everyone that we have cold black hearts, Alan having girly braided hair, and of course, Justin and Dustin refusing to leave the girls' sleeping room until it got awkward. Ahh...what jerks!


dustin sleeping on my bed. jerk. 

On Sunday morning we went back and cleaned some stuff up and did a few random jobs at the warehouse before meeting up with the rest of the group to head back on our 14 hour drive home. Everyone got a little cranky on that trip, and the swear word letters and church official names were flying. But praise the Lord we made it home safe, even though my air conditioner was leaking water into the car all the way back. We soaked about five towels. It was kind-of gross.

Ok but in all seriousness, the trip was incredible. The people were so appreciative of us being there, and their appreciation made it worth the trip. They said they were glad we came because we did the job that no one else wanted to do. And even though it felt like we barely scratched the surface of that mountain, the people at the warehouse noticed a difference. I know everyone felt like we had done the job God wanted us to do. And we got to have a lot of fun doing it too. That's for sure.

There's several other things that I didn't talk much about here, like our constant quoting of the book of Tate, the inmates and staff at the warehouse, that one kid saying "shut-up with the ollies", driving down the highway with the Bone Thugs gunshot song blaring while we shot at cars, turning our caravan into a game of Mario Kart (freakin' Bowser won), throwing a CD at Justin's car, Lucas trying to say "what a jerk!", Katie talking about the river flowing, Emily using the word "grinding", etc., but it's okay. It wasn't REALLY about that.

It was about serving people for the sake of Christ.

And anyway, what happened in the missionary house should really stay in the missionary house.


vandalizing justin's car. and lucas in his toga. 

The end. ish.