Today was unlike any other day for my fellow students and I! We had the opportunity to assist Riverbank Church’s Brattleboro location set up in the conference center of a local hotel and it was awesome getting the chance to serve them!

After having left our home at 5:45 to make it to the Brat.
location we began setting up at 7 AM sharp. We unloaded a storage unit in the hotel’s parking lot and set up the entire church experience in an hour and a half. It was awesome seeing the people of Riverbank church setting up and how they ran everything because the created an amazing worship experience out of storage container! Helping them was an absolute joy and we were able to help with everything from covering the walls and hooking up wires for the band, to helping with production and worship. All of us worked together with such cooperation and unity!

We then began the service at 10 AM sharp. Something that surprised the students and I was the number of people that were there. Many of us had expected more people to be there even though the amount there was higher than normal for Brat, but this didnt matter because those there were being fed the Living Word of God. the people of Riverbank Church provided a God honoring service and Pastor Chris gave a message on Galatians 5 and the Freedom found in the Holy Spirit! We were amazed by the amount of work these people put into reaching and serving the people of Brattleboro on every Sunday. They do everything with excellence as to honor God and to glorify Him and their zeal and faith are continuous inspirations for us all. They are amazing servants of God and I know that I will be keeping them in my prayers as they continue to reach out to the lost.

After closing up service and breaking down all of the equipment, we enjoyed a nice lunch and then went to a swimming hole where I got to jump off a small cliff into a pool of water! It was an awesome experience! We all had a lot of fun!

But for me, one of the highlights of the day was our final debriefing meeting. We came together and talked about how fun it was to serve and help set up a church experience this morning. We then went around in a circle and had a time of affirmation where each member of the team received a chance to be built up by there fellow team members (students and leaders). It is hard to convey in words how much God moved in each and everyone of us over the past couple of days, but he broke down many walls and brought us all closer together as a unified team as we all sought to serve others and to follow His Will in all things. God worked in all of our hearts SOOOOO much and He helped me truly develop a heart for the lost unlike ever before and showed me how to work alongside others even more than before.

This time together was special for me though because this marked the end of my last event of the summer before I go to college and was my last event/trip as a student. They really built me up over this trip. This will truly be a missions trip that I will never forget. God blessed me with a great foundation being His Word and a great support group in the form of this team, my friends and family, and SouthbrookChurch as a whole! I have every intention of returning to NH sometime in the future as well!

God bless everyone!