March 9-14 2009 Cleveland Urban Plunge

I spent the first week of my spring break on Intervarsity's Cleveland Urban Plunge. We spent the week looking at different ministrys and how God is already working in the City. We spent lots of time in the Word, visiting shelters and ministries and hanging out. We stayed at the Nehemiah Mission which was a great facility that brings groups into the city. Saturday Night we attended a Hip Hop Worship Service that was SWEET! We spent one afternoon doing what we chose in the City. My group walked around and we stopped in a catholic church and we were given the opportunity to see St. Katherines (I believe) bones. Her entire body. It was a unique experience. I was a tad un comfortable because "I don't do Dead People" but it was a really unique experience.

We got to know the city the good ole fashion way by getting lost and doing a scav. hunt with a map. I was the navigator it was a good time. Our team was pretty sweet! Part of Team Awesome as we liked to call ourselves One of the ways we interacted with the city was to paint tiles of all the good things the city has going for it. We represented culture, ethnicity, food, people, etc. Everything that is in a city. They were all very colorful. We woke up the next morning to find that all we got for breakfast was junk food to give us a small sample of what it is like to be hungry and only have non nutritious "food" to start out your day. We also found out that Annie had smashed all of our tiles... It was a rough morning :) She broke them to represent how the city is broken but it can be made into something beautiful. She gave all of the pieces to her cousin and he came up with this to show how that brokeness can be something beautiful. I thought this was pretty spectacular. The Blue pieces with the black stripes was my tile.

Our team was a hoot! We so enjoyed spending the ride to each place together. We laughed so much. One of the reasons was because for the first part of the week it seemed everytime some how or another we were behind Dan and he had this bumper sticker and we were just so sick of seeing it. It was also a reminder of all of the "Birth" analogies we had heard that week. It was amazing how many different people used birth as a way of explaining things to us. I think the best was we went to a Southern Baptist Church and the pastor used birth very heavily in his message and he told us to turn to our neighbor and say "It's time to PUUUUUSSSSHHH!"

Dan and Mykal were a blast as well. They would get so wrapped up in their conversations that they would get lost and go the wrong way. Even when we were following them we wouldn't follow because we never knew if they would get to the right place or not.