A Week Ago Today. Monday.

Day 1 of the Joplin Relief Trip.
The stress didn't start today, it started a few months ago. I had asked the youth leadership and planning crew what they wanted to do for their summer trip. I tossed out a few options like concerts, conventions, and theme parks. But, in May, a tornado had ravaged the town of Joplin, Missouri. I will admit that I played around with the idea of a relief trip, but was far to unsure of my own leadership to suggest such a thing! Really, giving up an entire week of summer to go and work? And not even at the youth group favorite orphanage in Mexico? So, I kept it to myself. At the meeting though one of the youth, Ricky, spoke up and said that one of his close friends had lost friends of her own in the tragedy that befell Joplin. The reception was almost completely unanimous, and so we decided that I should take the idea of a relief trip in the week of Thanksgiving (to be able to completely plan and execute) to the next staff meeting. At the staff meeting, Pastor Nathan suggested that we do the trip ASAP! Given the nature of the trip, he felt it was not something we could put off. So after going back and forth a couple of times between him and the group, we settled on a week at the end of July, starting on the 25.
We started getting things ready, and of course, this was when the stress happened. I had never done ANYTHING like this in my life. Taking a group of young people to an Acquire The Fire convention is a walk in the park compared to something of this nature! I got in contact with different people here and there and sure enough, after a bit I had us registered with a volunteer group and staying at a church near the area. Time passed, and before I really knew it, I had 15 total people going in two vehicles to somewhere I had never been before to do something I had never done before. As the planning went, I thought we were going to be eating sandwiches and chips for lunch with bottles of water. THANKFULLY, Jenni Baier got involved with the trip and took over the logistics of it, and saved the day after day with meals and budgeting and about a million other things!
Josh Dupree, one of the older but still young people in the group was my copilot for the trip and Nora Fisher was the Life Jacket of Our Morale! Self title Grambo (Grandma-Rambo) kept our spirits up from start to finish! As we started on the road, we headed up 165 toward Monroe as the GPS told us to. Pastor Nathan called us back and told us to head up 167 to Shreveport and after this little bump we ran into no problems the first 95 percent of the trip. (I did notice in the middle of the day it seemed that we weren't hitting ANY of the little towns I had anticipated, and I checked the GPS against my iPhone, and we were going OUT OF OUR WAY to go to Little Rock!! After the anger checked out tho, I really started enjoying the BEAUTIFUL scenery of a land I had never visited til that day!) I had a little time to get used to pulling around an enormous trailer, but after about 2 hours of driving, I didn't even notice the pull it had on the van! But about one hour close to our destination, we were headed up the hills inherent to the area of Branson and Springfield, and Josh and myself heard a pop and a hiss and my foot went to the floor. The van lost 98 percent of it's power and we coasted to a stop on the side of the road. We looked at the tires first, thinking that we had blown one, but all of them seemed to be intact. Then we popped the hood, nothing LOOKED bad, so I revved the engine a couple of times, nothing! No problem at all! At least not until we started to drive, we started seeing an increase in the black smoke characteristic of a diesel exhaust system, and we weren't getting but up to MAYBE 25 MPH while going up these huge hills of the great state of MO. The van just couldn't find the power to pull the weight of the youth, and the trailer (stuffed to the gills with our supplies for a week of relief work) ANYWHERE! So we pulled off at a restaurant and tried to clear our heads a bit. The stress level for me was through the roof, but I had just spoken to the youth about Gods providence and how if HE called you to something He would provide the way to get there, the means to do it and the strength to carry it out. I used Peter walking to Christ on the sea as the prime example.
After dinner, Josh and I go out to the van and field strip it to get a better look at the engine. We removed the lower parts of the dashboard and backing to get access. I was texting and speaking to Vic Riscili back in Pineville, who, after listening to what I had to tell him about the van, said that it sounded like the Turbo was out. Well, given that all the experience I have had with cars was gas tanks and oil changes, I didn't have the slightest idea what to look for. After sending him some pictures and conversating, we had an idea of where to look, but were still as lost as could be. While Josh and I were outside with the van, two things were happening inside the restaurant that we were unaware of.
1. Ricky Gallagher was talking to his mother, who had gotten a call from Ricky's Uncle Johnny letting her know that he wanted to spend some time with his nephew and help out with some of the relief work. Uncle Johnny had quite a bit of knowledge in engines and working on them.
2. Nora Fisher was praying that the Lord send someone to help us out and get us on our way.

Cut scene back to two confused young men outside. In the parking lot of the restaurant, a trailer is waiting for it's rig, and suddenly, out of the growing darkness, a diesel pulls up and latches up with it in one fell swoop, it was kind of a thing of beauty! Josh see's this and say's, "Dude, this guy is a pro! Let's ask him what he thinks it is!" My thoughts at that moment were "Josh, he drives a rig, not a 15 passenger van, that's two TOTALLY different things! I don't wanna bother this guy!" but my brain stopped those words from spilling out of my gaping hole of a mouth when Josh said, "What have we got to lose?" I thought about it. We really didn't have ANYTHING to lose, here we were within an hours drive of our destination with 15 young people that had been on the road ALL day, so let's go over to this guy and ask. He tells us EXACTLY where the turbo is and how it sounds like that is the exact problem we are having! He confirms everything that Vic has been telling us but hasn't been able to really SHOW us. Then he drives off into the night, on a tight schedule.
It's not a problem that will bench us, but it will slow us down. With renewed hope, we set off into the night. Dark has fallen at this point and the hills were larger than ever that lay before us. We had to start "Sling-Shotting" the van down the hillsides to gain enough speed to make it to the top of the next hill!! It was a bit dangerous, but God kept his hand on us the whole way! We were exhausted as we finally pulled in to the church parking lot where we were staying and checked in. I had been really scared that it was going to be this poor little one room chapel with an outhouse and barely there electricity. Ahem. This was NOT the case. ALL of our spirits lifted when we saw our home for the next week. It was a BEAUTIFUL AG church in Mount Vernon, MO.  As the youth piled into the church and began to get set in their rooms, Josh and I worked on the van. Ricky stayed on the phone late into the night giving Uncle Johnny directions on how to get to the church. Josh and myself collapsed onto some army cots that were loaned to us by Terry Gilcrease for the trip. It was 0230 in the morning and we woke up at roughly 6:30 to be ready in time to see Uncle Johnny in the morning. I remember thinking that if we came up the way we thought we would with all the tiny towns, we may not have made it, the road was to small and curvy and hilly to get ANY momentum at all, and God had laid out the path that we took for a purpose too! Talk about PROVIDENCE! But all in all, this was JUST the beginning! As I closed my eyes I acknowledged that today was one of the longest days of my life.