The beginning: Road trip with strangers

Day 1. 8am. Strangers meet to embark on a journey that will certainly change us. To my surprise Channel 7 News is there. Interviewing and taking video to create a story about our team. We load up our caravan with tools, luggage, much needed water & sunscreen and our hope for the experience. We huddle around and share our hopes for this trip. I shared my hope that we would all truly be able to "be" with the people of Joplin. That we will be able to truly walk beside them and comfort them in their time of struggle. Mike, a member of our team who has had many experiences with service trips and disaster relief shared a story with us. The story of the starfish:

One day a man was walking along the beach when he noticed
a boy picking something up and gently throwing it into the ocean. 

Approaching the boy, he asked, "What are you doing?"

The youth replied, "Throwing starfish back into the ocean.  The surf is up and the tide is going out.  If I don't throw them back, they'll die."

"Son," the man said, "don't you realize there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish?  "You can't make a difference!"

After listening politely, the boy bent down, picked up another starfish,
and threw it back into the surf.  Then, smiling at the man, he said
"I made a difference for that one."

At the time I believed that I truly understood why Mike was telling us this story and just loaded up into one of the two vans. It is clear to me now (sitting here back in Colorado) that I had a very small understanding of the message behind this story.

We loaded up and left our normal lives behind us. Filled with excitement, anticipation and fear we headed East. In 11 hours we will be in Pittsburg, KS, ready to face the day ahead. Boy were we wrong. I need to mention this because it is very relevant to the unexpected adversity that we faced. As we loaded up, one of our leaders, jokingly mentioned something that he mentions to all of his trips and that was "No Whining!" I think we all half - way took him seriously. Come on we are all adults here. We don't need to be reminded not to say "Are we there yet?" a million times. It turns out this simple statement proved to be a great deal of advice. Our trip certainly did not go as planned including an extra long stint to find gas right outside of Denver, our stake-bed truck loaded with tools and equipment ran out of gas and proved to add an extra hour to our trip. Actually that truck added quite a bit of time to our trip. Our mechanic on the trip found that the problem was unfixable, but it could have been worse. It could have been undriveable. But it wasn't. And we were off. Having to stop every 160 miles to fill the truck up. Extra stops added time (including losing an hour with the time change) but after what seemed like forever with very little whining we made it to Pittsburg, KS....at 2:00am.  It was amazing that throughout this lengthy trip, no one whined. I think this was so because we all knew what were were here for. We knew the importance of this trip and the impact that we were hoping to make. There was no room for whining with a mission so strong and giving.

We were supposed to meet at Missouri Southern State University at 8:00am the next day. With the 30 minute drive we were looking at less than 5 hours of sleep. We decided it would be in our best interest to start a little later which proved to be a wise choice. We all woke up energized and ready (or at least we pretended we were) for what we would see and hear in Joplin.  I think that was the shortest stay I have ever had at a hotel. We were in and out just like that. Ready to face the day ahead of us!