Mississippi……..Amazing
By Brett Yohn
May 2008
Forty-eight Nebraska students and I spent the week before Easter in Pass Christian, MS helping residents who are still rebuilding from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
This is the seventh trip that Nebraska students have made to the stricken region. Student leaders from several campus ministries, including Christian Challenge, organized the trip. But it was open to any student of any religious background who wanted to go and serve. Only a dozen students who went are active in any campus ministry and over twenty students are not yet followers of Jesus.
It was a very diverse group. It was clear to all the students before they signed up that there would be prayer and devotions on the trip. It was an amazing time of building relationships and serving human need side by side with students who have never been exposed to a relationship with Jesus or have discarded Jesus as irrelevant to their lives.
Each night after dinner, the entire group gathered to debrief their day and hear a short devotional I prepared. Picking up on the theme of Holy Week, I talked about what Jesus did and said before he went to the Cross. One young man said that he had never heard of the Triumphal Entry or the Passover.
The group bonded and showed love to one another. Though they were sleeping in tents and working hard at cleaning yards and painting the exterior of houses, the students kept an upbeat attitude. Flexibility was a needed value of the group when they evacuated tents one night because of wind and thunderstorms.
Upon returning to Lincoln, an Asian woman who went on the trip wrote that she missed everyone and felt a definite emptiness in her heart. One of the Challenge student leaders said, “She is not missing us. She is missing the presence of Jesus that flowed from us to her.”
It was one of my ‘top ten’ mission trips ever. Not because of the work we accomplished but because of the relationships that I was able to build with students seeking to know Jesus.
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