Baltimore 2010: Day Five

Finally…a beautiful day here in Baltimore!  After a few days of wind and cold rain, today was gorgeous!  God planned a great day for us to visit Oriole Park at Camden Yards.  We started our day with a devotion by Coach Dukes about the game that God is calling us to go into.  We rode the bus a few stops and hopped off at Camden Yards.  Everyone really enjoyed seeing the ballpark and hearing the history of Baltimore.  Bob was our tour guide and he did a fantastic job!

After the tour, we hopped back on the Charm City Circulator bus to ride back to The Gallery Church offices.  One of our favorite drivers, Evonne, was driving today and we were so glad to see her.  Chase Carroll had his picture made with her the other day and she calls him sweetie!  We have been so blessed to ride on the CCC bus because it has provided us a lot of opportunities to meet people and share about what God is doing in and through The Gallery Church here in Baltimore.

Once we arrived at the offices, it was time to eat our incredible lunches.  Be sure to ask your student what they had for lunch each day.  We hung out at the office and got ready for the afternoon.  We went back to FAST to help with a Block Party designed to draw people in so we could tell them about The Gallery Church and their Easter services.  Our job was to help hand out flyers in the neighborhoods and then come back to the school to help with inflatables, kickball, football, soccer, games, and other activities for the kids.  We had a blast!  You will notice all of our sun when we get home tomorrow.  It is not the deep kind of tan that some of you are hoping to pick up over Spring Break…more like a farmer’s tan, but a tan nonetheless!

As the afternoon unfolded, it was great to see all of our students venture outside their comfort zones in order to meet new people and share the love of Christ with them.  This whole week has been about God giving us a new perspective on things and revealing to us where we can join Him in His work here in Baltimore.

We have had such a great week that we decided to celebrate with dinner and games at the ESPN Zone.  Kids never get too old to play video games…even those of us that are adult kids!  After dinner we walked back to the hotel for our last night team meeting.

Our team meetings this week have started by everyone sharing their favorite part of the day.  We have really enjoyed hearing everyone’s highlights.  We have also talked about what God has taught us each day.  It has been incredible to see the way that God is working in our hearts and confirming our theme verse of John 3:30, “He must become greater, I must become less.”

Ellis, the lead pastor at The Gallery Church, joined us for this meeting and expressed appreciation to our team and all of their hard work this week.  He said that we helped them build relationships in the community that would have taken their staff months to accomplish on their own.  We enjoyed visiting with Ellis and look forward to continuing to partner with The Gallery Church through our prayers and other opportunities to serve them.

We finished up our meeting with prayer requests, group prayer, and our team chant (ask your student about that).  Tomorrow will be an early morning as we check out and load up to ride the CCC bus over to the church office.  We are doing a project at Patterson Park, eating lunch at the church office, and then riding the train to catch the plane.  We are hoping to arrive in Atlanta a little after 6pm around the same time as our friends on the Guatemala, Paris, and New York trips.  The Washington, DC crew will be back closer to 10pm.  Please remember to pray for all of our Short Courses as they will be wrapping up and the College Tour as their bus rolls back in around 7pm.

This has been an incredible week in the lives of our students and staff that were privileged enough to participate in the first ever NCCS Spring Term.  Thank you for your prayers and support as we embarked on our adventures.  Please be sure to ask your students to tell you what they did over the course of the week and challenge them to share with you what God taught them.

TOGETHER…Cultivating Hearts.  Challenging Minds. Impacting Culture.

Megan Strange

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