We’ve now been back for a couple of days from out time in Denver, CO with our high school students. We left on Thursday June 23rd and arrived in Colorado Springs, CO the next morning. We took some time to grab a quick shower at the local YMCA before heading over to the Garden of the Gods for some hiking and sight seeing. We spent the first couple days of our trip just doing to touristy things and allowing our students some time to bond as we had some that were either brand new to the group or hadn’t been able to be around much during the year.
Our first tourist spot was Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. We had lunch in the cafeteria there and then various groups took off to do some hiking. One group stayed back and took a jeep tour of the area. The Garden was full of amazing bright red rock formations that we hiked around and even did some low level climbing. After the Garden we went over to the Sayers’ (friends of Steph’s) house for a cookout and some ultimate frisbee.
On Saturday we got up early and went over to Pike’s Peak to catch the Cogs Railway train up to the top of the mountain.
It took us about an hour and a half to make our way to the top with some great scenery as we ascended. We got to spend about 35min at the summit taking pictures and enjoying the scenery. It truly was an amazing sight to see. We then made our way back down (in which a lot of students caught a quick nap due to the lack of O2 at that elevation). We spent Saturday night in a Sleep Inn Hotel.
Sunday morning we were able to go to Woodmen Valley Chapel for church. It is a large church in which we were able to participate in, through simulcast, multiple campus’s worship. Each campus had their own worship band that was playing in sync with our worship band and the pastor was by live video feed from the other campus. The message taught us to shine our light for Christ, a message that hit home with many of our students and leaders and left them impacted to begin their mission work.
We arrived Sunday evening in Denver, CO after a quick spontaneous stop at the Air Force Academy Chapel in Colorado Springs. We got settled with Youth Works and had our dinner and devotions for the night. Our work week was Monday through Thursday.
Monday we set out for various work sites. There were three other churches with us at Youth Works and we were divided up into groups consisting of kids and leaders from each church. We did various jobs such as working at nursing homes, painting houses, food pantries, Salvation Army, Parks and Recreation (trail maintenance), sandwich walks for homeless in Denver and more.
Each night we had “Club Time” (devotions) with Youth Works followed by our church time. In our church time we let the students pass a trophy to each other to recognize their fellow students they thought went above and beyond that day or sometime during the week. We then each night put a senior in the middle and did some “senior affirmation”. Students would let the seniors know how much they have meant to them and impacted their lives as they head off to college in a few weeks. It was truly a meaningful and powerful experience. Many wet eyes during that time.
I just wanted to give a short (haha) recap of the week for those of you that haven’t already heard it a million times from our students or are not affiliated with our church. If you want to hear more I encourage you to attend church at Castleton United Methodist Church on August 21st at either 8:30, 9:40 or 11:00 as our students will be leading all three services and sharing their experiences from this trip as well as our middle school trip and the Ichthus Festival trip.
I purposely didn’t talk much about the service projects because there were so many different one’s and I was only involved with one group. I’ll let our students fill you in on that part. Maybe I can even talk a couple of them into guest posting about their mission trip experiences sometime this summer.
***more photos available on Phao Student Ministries Facebook page***
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