WARNING: The blog you are about to read may contain jumbled and unclear thoughts. Read with understanding.
I honestly am not quite sure how to put this trip into words and give it justice. So much happened during that week in St. Louis that I'm not even going to try to jam it into one unsuspecting blog. Consider this part 1. Here we go:
I'm going to start out by saying I originally did not plan on going on this mission trip. I had already signed up for a backpacking trip with YoungLife and the dates crossed and the cost would've been too much anyway. One Sunday during our worship time, Alan announced that they were going to have a St. Louis meeting afterwards and free lunch would be provided. For some reason I felt pulled to the meeting, in the moment I thought it was the free Little Caesar's. Later I'd find that it was a God thing.
During the meeting my heart went under some radical changes. I won't go into any serious details (mainly because I feel like this part of the story is taking too much room) but I pulled a 180 and decided to do the mission trip.
A month or two later I was payed for, packed and on my way to Missouri. I won't go into details on the ride up there (Julie said we could go to like a million different places just because whenever we'd ask something like, "are we almost there yet" or "can we go to the Oz museum", she ALWAYS said yes), but it took around 13 and a half hours.
As we drove through the city on our way to the church we were staying at, I observed. Something that shocked me even though I'd heard about it, was how neighborhoods could go from wealthy looking to ghetto instantly (I also saw a billboard for a restaurant named Hot Tasty Butts, which Julie said we could go to).
While I had also heard prostitution, drug deals and gang violence weren't exactly uncommon there, I still found it shocking. Being around issues of that intensity really made me think about how sheltered life is in the Springs. While those issues do happen, they're fairly unheard of. In St. Louis, though, kids around the age of 6 probably know more about drugs then I may ever know.
Seeing all this junk made me wonder how good being sheltered is. I can understand sheltering to a point, but if people don't even know what's going on in places like St. Louis, how are they supposed to help? Besides seeing how sheltered we are, I also noticed that the Springs is pretty separated, not just by race, but by class too.
It's weird how being in a place that is so far out of my comfort zone for only an hour or two can change the way I look at my own city and even (to the extreme) life itself.
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