Joplin--Play

If I like working with my church family, I LOVE playing with them.

Decades ago, our church mission trips meant working half the day, then sightseeing and playing throughout the afternoons and evenings.  Sometime while I was a child, the workers took over, and the majority of every day was spent working.  That is arguably a better way of doing mission trips, but I have to admit I really liked that the extreme heat of Joplin necessitated work being cut off at noon.

This meant longer lunch breaks, hearing stories of adventures that morning and going back for seconds of homemade cookies.  It also meant afternoons at the pool with a huge group of Woodlanders.  One time I was the first to the pool, and three random teenage boys were there.  Didn't they know this was Woodland's pool?, I wondered, before remembering that we were staying at a public motel.

At the pool, I got to take ridiculous pictures with Abby and James, wrestle for control of a hose with David, help Andrew surf on his boogie board, and learn to swim adult-doggy-style with Emily.  I could read books on the deck chairs with Stacy and avoid Jeff's massive splashes.

After pooling, we ate.  Several evenings almost the entire group (40 of us) arrived en masse at a restaurant.  We ate in different combinations, we shared food from each other's plates, and we waved gleefully at people across the room even though we had seen them only an hour before.

We also went to nearby waterfalls, perused used book stores,  had evening meetings, and endured a power outage with no A/C.

My church family is just that...a family.  I love spending time with them.  I love spending ALL the time with them.  If I had my way, I would eat every meal surrounded by my church family, and we would all gather for a debriefing at the end of each day.  Honestly, I would be quite content if our church was reworked as an apartment building, and we all just lived together for the rest of our lives.

Which is why it's sad that I'm leaving.  Sometimes I wonder why I want to move to Dallas, when so much of what I love is here in Peoria.  I've got an extended spiritual family who looks out for me, who is invested in my life, and who is kind enough to let me be a part of theirs.  I won't have them immediately nearby in just two weeks, so I am extremely grateful that I got an entire week of them, 24/7, in Joplin.