Greetings from Lodgepole, NE! I am accessing the internet at the pastor’s house of the church we are working with here (New Hope Fellowship) and it is the third day we have been here (not counting Sunday evening when we left.

Just a quick update, a longer version will come when I get home and I have time to type up my journal entries from each day.

We left Hattiesburg, MS at approximately 12:30am Saturday morning, we drove until 9pm Saturday evening, ending in Lincoln, NE. We came about 45 miles from Omaha, I wished we could have gone to Omaha, and if Iowa didn’t have a silly law about not letting 15 passenger vans come in we would have had a rout leading right through Omaha. We stayed the night and left Sunday morning about 10am and drove to a rest area about 11am and had a small church service, I read some scriptures and spoke a little, sharing the wisdom of past mission trips I have been on, since I am the only veteran mission tripper in the group of 12 from my church on this trip. We arrived in Lodgepole (south-western corner, small town of 250) at 5pm Mountain time, this is the furthest west I have ever been and the first time I have been in the Mountain time zone. It is also the first time I have been to Nebraska, the only new state this trip will bring to my list of places visited unless we take an alternate rout through Colorado.

Our mission here is a kids club in the mornings, we have had between 10 and 20 kids ranging in age from 1 to 13. Things have gone smoothly in my opinion, but as I said, I am a veteran to this kind of thing, the rest of our group is a bit flustered, learning to be flexible, even fluid as one trip leader I have been under put it. We have a two hour kids
club each morning, based on the vacation Bible school materials the southern Baptist convention puts out each year, but we have strayed a lot from it. But the kids are loving it. I will post some particular stories when I get back home.

Nebraska is, to say the least, beautiful. We turned off the interstate in MO onto a highway in NE and the countryside took my breath away, rolling hills covered with hills, sometimes it went absolutely flat sometimes it was covered in hills, green and brown alike. The drive was so nice (especially since the change in driving on Interstate 55 in MS/TN/AK (Is it AK? Or AR? Arkansas) which is.... awful.) since the roads were relatively smooth, the scenery beautiful. It was hot though when we got to NE. Hot hot hot, but not humid. We got to lodgepole and it cooled off the next day with the passing over of a front. Monday night and Tuesday morning it rained, the people thanked us for bringing the rain up, it has been a hard season for these people whose lives mostly revolve around farming. They lost their first crop of wheat this year to a bad wind and are now trying to recover with alfalfa and it has been dry here, so the rain was a welcomed change. It has been cool each morning with a goodly breeze (gentle in their terms, a wind in our south Mississippi terms.) Today it was cool and sunny and dry. I want to move to the midwest!!!

We have been treating the church people to some good southern cooking. Monday night we fried catfish and made hushpuppies and slaw. Last night we cooked chilie for them and had hotdogs and tonight we thawed the gumbo we brought and served it to about 30 people, including our group, the pastor and his wife, and some church members and non church members (just about covers everyone!)

We are staying in the basement/fellowship hall of the church which is a former catholic church now Baptist. They have showers installed just for this purpose - each year they have teams come in to work in the area all summer long. We had some pluming problems with the sinks backing up and leaking, so we were able to minister to the church also by repairing that. (The two men besides myself on this trip are very good all-around handy-men.)

The pastor and his wife to church planting work, they have been here about 2 years and have started this one and sent out a few church members to start a second in nearby
Colorado. He plans to begin working in Wyoming soon also. I’ll tell more about what the situation here is like later, when I have my journal to reference.

What I have been mostly amazed by is that most of the people I have met are not Nebraska natives, and a handful of them are well traveled. The pastor’s wife is a military
brat but native to Poplarville (the town my church is in) and her husband has been all over, he got his master’s at Golden Gate Seminary in California (San Fran), his song leader has been all over the country including MS and CA, and a family we met today (the husband’s name is Sherman Tank, no kidding) has been all over, he is from Indiana, but lived in Cali and Texas some and met his Polynesian wife in Iowa (where she said her brothers like to spear fish in the authentic Hawaiian style) in lakes and rivers, to the amusement of the locals, they have the most precious and friendly little girl, Koda.) There are, of course, a few natives, but I think that most of the locals aren’t really sure about this church yet.

We have had an extremely good time, went to Cabela’s, the world’s largest outfitter’s store, about 30 miles west in Sidney, NE, and we saw a missile silo today (not too
impressive visually, but it is fun to say that I have seen one.) I have gotten a BUNCH of pictures, 7 rolls of colour (mostly of the bible clubs and our group) and 1 black and white of town. I plan to get some colour shots of town tomorrow and probably some more of the prairies tomorrow (I got a few today.)

Well, I am going to end this update now, the full version will follow, I just decided that since the pastor here is letting me online I would post a quick one for ya’ll to know what’s going on.

I will return either late Saturday night or early Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon, we aren’t sure yet. Pray for us still! Thanks!
- posted by Nick @ 6/05/2002 11:49:00 PM | 0 comments