Philly, A Car, and Church

The last month has been rather busy! A lots been going on, even though I'm in the wanning time of my vicarage. So, I'm going to do my best to give a recap of what's been going on, as well as a preview into the next week and a half- maybe.
So, the first part of this month was spent getting to go on our servant trip to Philadelphia. I spent some time arranging places to stay and what not, needless to say, God's people really helped us out a lot!!! I found 3 LCMS churches for us to stay at on the way there and back.
The driving part of the trip wasn't bad, wasn't bad at all! I drove my car on up, yes my '94 Bonneville made it there and back without any problems, in fact I think that she's running a little bit better now too! Our first stop (on June 9th)was in Chester, VA, which is just outside of Richmond. I found out that this church, Grace L.C., is the home church to one of my friends from the seminary. That was pretty wild, when I was planning all this out, I wasn't even thinking about those kinda things at all. They were great to us too! They had a spaghetti dinner going on that night for their youth group and they invited us to be there and eat with them! They were great!
The next day we were off to our youth group leader's cousin's house near Baltimore, MD (if you're from there you say Bal-mere, Mer-lan...weird!). We stopped there to have lunch and clean up. They were really nice to us, they had pizza, soda, and Utz chips for us! Oh, I had a Tastykake too- so good, esp. the vanilla lovers cupcake!!! After that, we ventured up to Ridley Park, PA, which is a suburb of Philly. This is also Pastor Bill's father's church- St. Mark's. And, again, they were great! The pastor their brought me to a Philly Cheesesteak place. It was great! We all enjoyed the food a lot!
After church on Sunday, we spent some time in downtown Philly. We went to the Franklin Institute. Pretty much, it has a lot of Ben Franklin stuff there, but it also has a lot of other science museum stuff there too. I enjoyed my time there. In the afternoon we finally checked in at our youthworks site in Fishtown. Fishtown is the part of Philly that used to house the fishing industry (obviously by name, right?) and it is primarily a lower middle class area, not too much crime. It's an area in upswing, buildings are being rebuilt, the neighborhood is becoming more safe and all of that. West Philly is the bad part of town, we were not there. One of Erin's big concerns was my safety in Philly, luckily we were never in any harm.
There were 3 church groups there, ours, a group from Kentucky, and another group from W. Viriginia. Once we got there, we broke into 5 smaller groups, incorperating the different church groups together. I had about 3 of our 8 youths in my group of 8 (including myself). The youthworks staff had many different places arranged for all the groups to go to, only one group would go to a site for 2 days, then after 2 days we'd go to a new site. My group got to go to a mental health halfway house. To further explain it, it's people that deal with different mental health illnesses, like bipolar, and are medicated and they try to find jobs for some of these people. The people that we got to meet seemed fine, you wouldn't have known the difference between them and someone that didn't have any illnesses. At this place, we did a lot of cleaning. Much of the group was upset that we didn't get to minister to people, but that we were helping with the actual grounds. It's good to help in that manner, but more person to person interaction would have been nice. On the second day at this site, after we were all done, we went out to where our cars should have been parked. Well, one of the vehicles was still there (another group was next door to where we were)...mine was not.
This is how that went down: me: "Hey, my car's not there." random group people(RGP): "What, you are joking!" "Where did you park it?" me: "It must have been stolen. I didn't move it any where." RGP: "Are you for real?" "Are you okay?" "My purse was in the trunk!" me: "Eh, it happens." ...
I was actually pretty mellow about the whole situation. What ended up happening, was that before we called the cops, I called the tow company that watches over that lot. They had my car. From what we can understand is that they place that we were working at had not made arrangements for us to park there when we were told to. So, my car wasn't stolen, it was just being stored at $203.75 and on the other side of town. Obviously, we went and got it.
The next two days, we were at a place called Philabundance, which handles over 22 million pounds of food a year. We pretty much sorted food and some of us got to put it up on the shelves. I should probably explain this place a little more. What they do is they handle food and then soup kitchens and food pantries come and purchase food for 18 cents/lbs. It's really good for them, because they don't have to worry about sorting through nasty, expired food- like what we did. They get a very good deal (they said so themselves) and it provides an easier way to distrbute food. The group was a little bit more happy here, we felt that we were making more of an impact on the community at large, however, we still didn't get much human interaction outside of our group.
We worked at those places during the day and then at night we'd have events and activites planned for us. One night we went to the museum where Rocky did his thing...I should have pictures soon on that. Another night we spent it in the historical district doing a scavenger hunt, which I was not a fan of...I would have loved to have spent more time looking around at all of the historical sites that exist in Philly.
Then, we ventured back to Florida. On the way back we stopped in Raleigh, N.C. at Our Savior's L.C. There a friend of mine from the Sem was doing his vicarage, so it was nice to see him and see how things were going there. Raleigh is a nice town. That night we went to a place called the Hard Times Cafe...they specialized in chilli...it was good! I liked it a lot! Then on the 17th we finally made it back to Palm Coast. Erin was very happy to see me!
Right now, Bill is on vacation until July 10th, so he's given the church over to me to take care of while he's away. We're in our second week of him being gone and so far so good. I'm getting a good taste of what it'll be like when I'm all done with seminary. Pretty much, I have a lot more to do...which I like...I like to keep busy. The next question to ask is, "how do I have time to write this right now?" I am a little ahead of schedule...that's how!
So, a teaser for my next blog, probably a week from tomorrow July 5th, is that something big is going to happen over the next week! Come back next time to see!