Wesley Mission Update: Appalachia
Friends and family,
We’ve been on mission a week in Appalachia and have decided we’re not coming back—at least for two more weeks. After leaving from the Wesley in Ruston at 3 a.m. in the pouring rain, the Wesley mission team safely arrived 15 hours later at our first stop, Red Bird Mission in Beverly, KY. In many ways, Red Bird is to southeast Kentucky what the Wesley is to Ruston, Louisiana, a community of Christians whose hope is to serve their neck of the woods and to bear witness to the gospel of Christ in word and service. For over 100 years, Red Bird Mission has poured itself into the education, health and wellness, community outreach, economic opportunity, and community housing improvement of the people who live there.
The work has been good! Every day, we woke up at 5:45 and started our day with a time of individual prayer and reading. This mission we’re reading through New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton, a book about how to nurture our attention to God in our lives. After prayer we would meet at the Cardinal House, the mess hall and social space at Red Bird Mission, to have devotion with the other group from Pinopolis, South Carolina before eating breakfast. At the end of breakfast, we would load up in our vehicles with all our supplies and drive deep into the beautiful mountains of Kentucky to reach the house we were working on. Work lasted until 4 p.m. with a break for lunch before we returned along our winding and climbing roads to wash up before dinner and free time (corn hole, waterfalls, games, and naps!). At dinner we would have another devotional led by someone from either of the work groups before our group headed upstairs for our own time of prayer and singing. The last thing we would do before going to bed was our debrief, a time to share what had happened that day either on the site or in our hearts. This time has been an important opportunity for the students to share about their experiences of the mission so far and to care for each other.
We came to join in on the housing improvement work of Red Bird Mission by re-roofing the home of Mr. Robert and Mrs. Jackie. We came to serve and be on mission to the people of Appalachia. Before the work, what we discovered first was this: that God has given us a family here. That God has given us a home here. While at Red Bird, we were blessed to be led by a faithful man named Elzie. Witty, friendly, and full of life, he led us for the whole first week of work and extended more patience to us than we deserved. He was willing to answer our endless stream of questions and help us recover quickly from every amateur construction mistake. Even on what should have been his rest day, Elzie took us to see his garden (which was ginormous) and the wild horses that lived on his family’s land. In every sense of the word, Elzie was our shepherd. A good one. This deep hospitality was not relegated to Elzie, though. Mr. Robert and Mrs. Jackie did everything possible to ensure that we were comfortable while working on their roof. They opened their home for us to use whenever we needed, shared snacks with us, and, perhaps more importantly, shared their stories with us. Mr. Robert, a former night shift manager for a local coal mine, probably ought to have been a preacher or a Sunday School teacher—at the very least—by the way he shared the gospel with us during the rain breaks. His stories were interesting and threaded through with scriptural references.
If we at the Wesley are the missionaries to the campus of La Tech and the people of Ruston, and if the people of Red Bird Mission are missionaries to the people of Appalachia, what we discovered this week was that we also are witnesses to one another about the work that God has done and will do in our lives. Together, we have been the missionaries of the Lord to the people of Appalachia and to each other. These people are our own people, our family. Your family. We love them and they loved us before we loved them. The people here know God in proportion to the amount that they cry out to Him in their joy and need—there’s plenty of both to be had. It’s been a long, wonderful week.
P.S. Yesterday we made the drive safely to Princeton, Kentucky where we will be working this week in disaster relief to respond to the devastating tornadoes that came through last December. We will also be hosting a VBS at a local church.
