And we’re off! Please keep the whole team in your prayers this week as we travel to central Michigan today, work in the heat all week, and head back this Saturday!

Updates to this blog will be made as often as possible. Please be patient!

This year, the First Church of Lombard Youth Community are heading to Wyoming, Michigan to work with UCOM (United Church Outreach Ministries).

All are invited to a special “Sending Forth” for the Mission Team, to be held during the 9:30 a.m. worship service on Sunday, June 22. Please keep the team in your prayers… and be watching for updates during the week of the trip (June 22-28) right here at https://ycmissiontrips.home.blog/!

We keep adding them as we get them! Please excuse any duplicates… we have hundreds of photos and videos to sort through!

PLEASE NOTE OUR SPECIAL GUEST, former YC member Ashley Bieze Wilson, who lives in the area! Ashley told us about her Youth Community experiences, how she continues to live out the lessons she learned at First Church of Lombard, and told us her first-hand experience about living through the tornadoes of 2021.

On Friday we celebrated a fantastic week with one of the best “fun days” this ol’ blog writer has ever had. After a little bit of a lie-in, we headed to Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area and checked out the Nature Center, some hiking trails, and the Elk & Bison Prairie (where we saw a whole herd of bison, including several babies!).

Then we hopped back in the vans for a small cove of a lake we “rented” for the afternoon and made use of a whole fleet of canoes, kayaks, and stand-up paddleboards before heading out for dinner at the “Thirsty Turtle.” Live music, a delicious menu, and a relaxed lakeside dinner was exactly what we all needed!

This week, the Youth Community did over 1100 volunteer hours and saved our host organization (Camp GRAVES) about $37,000 in costs because they did not have to pay professionals to haul, cut and hang drywall in a home that is being converted into four apartments called “Camp Sanctuary”; build a deck and wheelchair ramp for one of their volunteer coordinators; rout out some plumbing; fix a sink; and (maybe most impressively), dig a 60+ foot trench in the burning sun and lay conduit for electrical lines. Plus, a group would cook dinner each night! We only took a break to tour the tornado damage, putting our own discomforts in perspective.

All of this work puts the completion of that apartment building ahead of schedule by a few weeks, meaning that 4 families will have homes that much sooner! We did so much hard work in such a small amount of time and First Church of Lombard should be proud of this team!

To end our week, we threw a barbecue for the residents of Camp Graves, some of whom are going to be moving into Camp Sanctuary! It was an amazing way to end our work week, getting to see those who will be living in the home we helped make possible.

Due to limited connectivity we were unable to get many of our pictures posted in the latter half of the week… and now have over 809 to go through! Keep watching here for more coming very soon.

Please keep the whole team (especially our very tired adult drivers!) in your prayers as we head back to Lombard today! Hoping for a nice easy journey and safe travels!

Today we celebrate a long week of hard work by heading to Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area, about an hour east of where we have been staying. With amazing nature centers, a planetarium, an elk and bison prairie, and so SO much more, this national park will be just the place to rest and relax! Check it out at https://landbetweenthelakes.us/

This week, the fantastic folks at Camp GRAVES (which stands for Goals, Relief, Aim, Virtue, Empower, Success!) have coordinated all of our serving projects! It is thanks to them that we aren’t just twiddling our thumbs down here! Their mission is providing disaster relief, temporary interim housing for victims of disaster or displacement due to no fault of their own and breaking negative cycles that hinder success through educational opportunities, supportive resources, job, and life skills classes to empower individuals to obtain and maintain financial independence and housing stability. See https://campgraves.org/ for much more!

You can also check out https://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/local-organization-helping-people-who-fell-through-the-cracks-after-dec-10-2021-tornado/article_027abc3e-cf73-11ee-b826-7f627376ec09.html for a video and some media coverage of this fantastic organization!