We started the morning in Albuquerque with a team pep talk and prayer. Our caravan arrived at 2:00 p.m., after at least 20 restroom stops, and pulled into the parking lot at Memorial Baptist Church – a small, five-room building with approximately 30 active members. Their soup kitchen, called Loaves and Fishes, feeds the community several times a month and delivers meals to the homebound.
Chinle is in the northwest corner of Arizona, about one hour from Gallup, NM. When I Googled “Chinle AZ”, the following information pulled up: The population of Chinle is 4518; 89.8% are American Indian; 45% of Chinle residents live in poverty; the median household income is $19,930; 31.8% of people over 25 are unemployed. There are 7 businesses in town and little opportunity for employment. The majority of those employed work for the schools and hospital. Before we left I had a picture in my mind of what it would look like, and it turned out to be pretty close to what I saw when we arrived.
We unloaded all of the food and equipment and prepared for our 5:00 p.m. Session 1 activities – or at least we thought we were prepared. Mark and the other vans started off by picking up the kids for Baseball Camp and dropping them off at the high school. Then they picked up some more kids and brought them to the church for D-Now – there were a couple of teenagers and lots of elementary age kids. But wait…this isn’t what we had planned. The D-Now activities were planned for teens and would not be appropriate for the younger kids. The D-Now books we brought were for teens. The D-Now lessons were planned for teens. With children running around everywhere, the team had to launch from Disciple Now mode into Vacation Bible School mode. On the fly, they revamped the lessons, games, and music. For two hours, Alan sang every children’s song he could think of. The Cooking Team hadn’t planned VBS snacks, and these kids were starving, so we dipped out the ice cream we had bought to go on the peach cobbler for that evening’s fellowship. The afternoon felt like absolute chaos.
At 7:00 p.m., after the vans took the kids home, we moved chairs into the parking lot and had a sing-along and fellowship with the church members. Everyone was exhausted, but it was monsoon season with rain in the area and the temperature was perfect, the sunset across the desert was beautiful, and we were all calmed as we sang songs of praise.
We had our nightly group meeting after the fellowship and worked on a plan – a new plan – for the next day. We discussed the need to feed the VBS kids lunch and snacks, and whether someone would need to drive to Gallup to buy more food. Instead, a plan was devised to stretch the food we already had and make it work. Someone had already made a call to Pioneer Drive and they were emailing VBS curriculum before the night was over. Venita, from our Ladies’ Bible Study Team, said she would be glad to be in charge of the VBS. She’s an elementary school teacher and a pro at VBS. So Venita said, “Jimmy, I’ve got this.”
Day two was full of laughter, tears, joy, sorrow, chaos, calm, excitement and amazement at what God can do.