about Gospel Road...

So we’re back, and nearly recovered, from our week at Gospel Road. It was a wonderful week, great youth ministry and great service done. The setup is this: 100 kids and their YM’s come together on Monday and do some icebreakers, meet their small groups, and start learning to work together through some neato initiatives (designed by the brilliant Scott). Then they are divided into two houses and get to pray and play together with this new community on Monday night. (We were in a basement room with no AC, and it was HOT. Lots of running around and within an hour that room was a gloriously stinky place. I mean, really. STANKY. But, oh so fun.
On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, the small groups rotate between three service sites. We adults are stationed at one of them all week and host each group for one day. I was stationed at a crisis pregnancy center, and the groups that came there with us worked hard at renovating rooms of a convent to house homeless mothers and their newborns. It was hard work but really really rewarding. The couple who run this place are lovely and holy and had a sweet 6 month old baby who they made sure everyone got a chance to hold. We had to scrape up 50 year old carpet padding from the hardwood floors in three “cells”, which apparently, back then, they glued to the floor for some crazy reason. But what the kids found so rewarding was the building of a retaining wall out in front of the house. On Tuesday it was a pile of bricks and weedy dirt, and by Thursday it was a lovely wall, built by volunteers of donated bricks, a monument to our faith and prayers for the people who would pass through that home. It was so gratifying to watch it grow up in front of our eyes, and to see how hard the kids worked on making it happen.
Scott was stationed at a park where city kids spent the day because they have nowhere else to go. The kids at night told stories of working and playing with these kids that would be heartbreaking. One told of playing “house” with a young girl there, who told her she was the Mommy, but that she was divorced, and that there was a gun in the house. It was so shocking to her that a child would have those stories in her head, and to imagine what her real life must be like.
The kids also visited a nursing home for nuns, and talked about how happy all those lovely women are. The sisters were amazing witnesses to them, just by being their joyful selves.
Friday we celebrated Mass together, affirmed each other, and took the group picture. An absolutely wonderful week.
As for me, it was glorious to feel like a youth minister again, to work and play and pray and laugh and share with kids, instead of writing programs and planning calendars and training other adults to have the fun. I love comparing the “before” group picture at the parish before we left, to the “after” group picture at the very end of GR. In the first we are all standing up straight, smiling “school photo” style, looking game but unsure. On Friday, we are leaning into each other in matching t-shirts, arms intertwined. We’re physically different, as a group. Weeks like this are an investment in kids that pays beautiful rewards in the comments they share at “processing” time, the notes they wrote to me at the end of the week, the thankful parents who have been regaled with tales and inside jokes from their kids at home. A great connection has been made and will stay. Weeks like this are a blessing to everyone involved, and I’m so thankful for my experience there.