From Kylee About The Vermont Missions Trip

We just got back EARLY this morning from a week long missions trip with our youth kids in Rutland, Vermont. It was an amazing experience. There were two other youth ministries there, one from Wisconsin and one from Illinois. We were split into five teams with our kids, and we each had a little bit different schedule. Phil and his students spent the week at Camp Thorp, a camp for people with disabilities and special needs. My students and I spent the first half of the week making trails in the woods at a park, and the second half visiting nursing homes and running a afternoon children's program.

Things learned/observed:

1. Avoid vans full of middle school boys at almost any cost. They smell. And after 17 hours, they REALLY smell.

2. Make sure your refrigerator is functioning before you leave your house for a week. If it isn't, it smells when you get home. It REALLY smells.

3. Really, almost anything can be fun if you are willing to make it fun. My favorite part of the week was shoveling out a large pit in the middle of the woods. All day. For two days. Our kids are hilarious!

4. I have also learned the words to almost every pop/dance song that exists. Plus some sweet car-dance moves to accompany them.

5. Phil is amazing with kids. I guess I already knew this, but it was a beautiful reminding. I mean, he is REALLY great.

6. Every person, EVERY PERSON, wants to love and be loved.

This was the strongest lesson for me. The last day, my students and I went to a nursing home's dementia/Alzheimer's wing in the morning and to the Kids Club in the afternoon. There was a lady at the nursing home named Anna, who alternated between pretty funny and pretty angry. At one point, the nurse handed her a baby doll. And this woman held it so naturally, she'd probably held a hundred babies in her life, and she just put her face down really close and whispered to her baby and rocked it. I lost it. She had probably loved and taken care of people her whole life, and now, even with her grip on reality slipping, she just wanted to love still. And she did it how she could.

We then went and played with a bunch of kids. I'd been pretty stressed the day before at the Kids Club because I was trying to keep track of all of my teenagers as well as all these little guys and worry about the programming at the same time. I decided to relax the next day, and I found a little boy who was playing with rocks in the parking lot. So, we played with rocks. We threw them at airplanes, we skipped them, we buried them, we unburied them... and he was laughing and smiling and loving it (Oh yes, so was I!)... but God really showed me that as simple as it was, that's all that little guy really wanted: to play with rocks and be loved.