I love mission trips. I believe it is the best way for me to connect with people in need and see of the results of putting faith into action. I just got home from a one week trip with three others from my church. We were working with about 40 others building two houses for Habitat for Humanity in Port Arthur, TX.

I learn a great deal of things about myself and others as I work on mission trips. On this particular trip I learned the need for patience when working with groups. While I have a tendency to organize events that I am in charge of it become very easy for me to become inpatient when others are not as organized as I am. When we arrived at the church which was to be our home for the week we discovered the slab for both of the homes we were to be working on were yet to be poured. They were originally to be poured on Friday before we arrived on Sunday but because of some bureaucratic hold up they could not be poured until the following Monday. That meant the crew would have to be split up to a couple of different sites for Monday work. So the team I was on went to work on some other habitat homes in Beaumont while the other crew went to the site to do some work building some prefab items that could be done while the slab was being poured.

It wasn't until Tuesday after lunch that my crew made it to the site and actually began working on the houses. That was all right because I had the opportunity to work Tuesday morning in Sabine Pass a community that was literally wiped out by the hurricane and from what I saw very little work had been done because there was still a lot of major clean-up to do from three years ago.

But in spite of the late start we were able to do a little catch up over the rest of the week and even though were were not as far along as they wanted to be. I felt we accomplished a lot of work in a short period of time. We had come a long way from no slab on Monday to where we wrapped up on Friday.

Some in our group were planning to work both weeks but others like me only gave one week to the project. But I can't wait to see the progress they are making this week.

I am posting a video of pictures that were taken on the trip I was on and the song is by Casting Crowns, "Who Am I" from the CD: "Casting Crowns". I plan on showing the video in worship Nov. 16th.