In 2007 I served as a Sierra Service Project counselor for the first time. I took a small group of youth from Palo Alto First United Methodist Church to Weitchpec, the site that I had been to as a camper in 1993. Before the youth and I left, my dad (who was a counselor at this site in 2006 and earlier in 1993) challenged me to find the project I’d worked on as a fifteen year old. I laughed, given my sense of direction, I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t remember where I’d worked 14 years earlier.
One morning before most of the campers were awake I got up to take a walk. Leaving the firehouse where we slept, I headed toward the elementary school that had housed us years before. There was a short little road, which I wandered down, and sure enough, there was the trailer that my work team had begun an addition to years before. The trailer was now abandoned and overgrown with blackberry brambles, but our addition was still standing.
In 1993 my work team, I think that year we were the 16 penny screwers, because we were using 16d nails and screws, worked mostly with hand tools. On Friday someone brought us a generator – we got a lot done that Friday. We cleared brush, dug holes for posts, and built the subfloor. In my four years as a camper, it was probably the SSP project where I left feeling like we made the most difference in a family’s life. We got to meet the girls whose bedroom we were building, and there was very clear progress at the end of the week. Plus, it was a team that had a lot of fun together. In 1994 (and 1995) I ended up serving with a young woman whose team had finished the 1993 addition, so I eventually got to see pictures of the finished work. It looked a lot better in those pictures than it did in 2007!
As I reflect on my call to young adult mission work, seminary, and eventually ordained ministry as a small church pastor, I say with confidence that the understanding of the Gospel that I learned at SSP, the importance of putting my Christian faith into action, has been a key element shaping who I am today.
It’s memories like these that cause me to marvel at the continuity of Sierra Service Project in my life – as a first time camper in 1992 to a board member in 2011, with stops as a staff member and counselor along the way. As I reflect on my call to young adult mission work, seminary, and eventually ordained ministry as a small church pastor, I say with confidence that the understanding of the Gospel that I learned at SSP, the importance of putting my Christian faith into action, has been a key element shaping who I am today. I am grateful for those who envisioned opportunities for young people to be in ministry and mission in this corner of the globe before I was born, and I am grateful for the opportunity to now do my small part to provide such opportunities for a new generation of youth and young adults.