Mission

     Dublin Presbyterian Church is involved with many areas of ministry that reach outside of our church.

     These include:

 

One Great Hour of Sharing

     "Minute for Mission" By: Doug Spalding

What does mission mean? Last June I had the privilege of going on the mission trip to Oak Island, TX, which was devastated by Hurricane Ike in September 2008. A lot of clean-up had taken place before we got there and they were starting the rebuilding phase by that point but it was still an unimaginable scene. This being my first mission trip, I had really only seen stuff like that on TV. You see many of the houses down there are built on these massive stilts so the houses are 15-20 feet in the air because some flooding is common to them. A big storm now and then might be expected too but Hurricane Ike was extraordinary. The most powerful, lasting image I have is looking along the coastline there and seeing all these stilts with nothing on them. Sometimes they didn’t even have that – there would be a concrete foundation and holes where the stilts used to be.

That’s a pretty daunting and humbling image at the same time. We were only going to be down there a week, so what could we possibly accomplish? We would have to be there for a year just to make a dent in what needed to be done. To add to it, we happen to be down there during a heat wave. Now if people who live in southern Texas say it is hot, you can only imagine what a group from Ohio was feeling. It was easily over 100 degrees – 107…108…and high humidity - brutal. It was so brutal that we had to cut back on the work hours. We had to because it was just too much to take.

So we were part of the rebuilding process and we were going to do what we could. The team I was on was building a garage…a very big garage. In a fishing town, garages are apparently very important…and apparently very big. The homeowner, Nancy, had enough insurance money to rebuild her house but was relying on volunteers such as us to build her garage. So while we were working on the garage, the house was being built by a team of professionals right next to us. Over the week, we got to meet the crew and their foreman, shared some tools, stories and even some of our refreshments since these poor guys incredibly didn’t have anything drink, but we were certainly willing to help them out.

We so badly wanted to finish that garage but we soon realized that wasn’t realistic. There wasn’t much there when we started and too much more needed to be done. So the goal of Paul, one of the guys I was working with, and I became to get on the roof. We would have liked to complete the roof but at the very least, we needed to get up there. I had told everyone I knew before I left that I was going to be doing roofing in the Texas sun that week so I was going to be on somebody’s roof before I left Texas. We pushed it as hard we could all week. The last day, we still had things to do and knew we were running out of time because some people were VERY adamant on what time we were going to stop because we had to get on the road. We did negotiate a little extra time and finally got up there. The roof was probably 1/3 to 1/2 done when they pretty much forced us to come down. I didn’t know if Janis could make it up that ladder but I was fearful of what was going to happen if she did.

We came down, burnt, beat and a little defeated but we knew we did the best we could and that was all we could do. While we were sitting there recovering, the foreman from the house came over and said we thought we did a heck of a job. He said we should be proud for how much we accomplished and not to feel bad about not finishing. He said, "I got it." I must have given him less than a thankful look because he said, "Don’t worry, I’m not going to charge her. You guys did a lot and I’ll have my guys finish it up. I won’t leave it like this." So this foreman took his guys, guys he was paying to do a job he was being paid to finish by a certain time, off that project to do volunteer work.

I firmly believe our effort had an effect on him, that our act of charity caused him to have one of his own. That to me was a much larger accomplishment than the garage, and quite frankly, a pretty unexpected one. I initially went down there to build something, and I did, just not what I thought I was going to build.

But isn’t that really the point? You get to not only help the person your efforts were directed to, but you help yourself feel better in the process and you have an impact on others so that they want to help others too. That is NOW what mission means to me.