Weekend Update: LAC Retreat

Driving Through Santa Barbara

Another weekend came and went too quickly! I swear there's never enough time in just two days for me to rest up, have fun, and get all the homework I need to get done, especially this one. But this was byfar one of my favorite weekends here at APU.

This weekend, the LAC (Living Area Council) from Trinity Hall went on a retreat to Santa Barbara! Our Community Advisor (CA), essentially my boss, hosted and planned the whole retreat. My CA's roommate is from Santa Barbara and her parents still live there so we got to stay at their house.

We left Azusa's campus Saturday morning after a quick Starbucks run, and started the 1.5 hour drive north to Santa Barbara. Once we got there, we started our planned service project for the weekend. Part of being on the LAC includes getting service credits, so clearly we need to serve and this was just one way we will be serving this year. For the project, earlier in the week we made 45 PB&J sandwiches to hand out to the the homeless people of downtown Santa Barbara. 

Service Project 

This was one of the most interesting, weird, funny, sad, reflective service projects I've ever done. We split up into groups and went to different areas of the city. My group was on State Street, and we just started walking down the sidewalk. The juxtaposition was insane. You could see well-dressed, wealthy people walking down the sidewalk past all the beautiful, expensive stores (Anthropology, Urban Outfitters, etc.) and you could see dirty, ragged homeless people digging through the trash and sitting against buildings with cardboard signs.

Essentially, for two hours, our role was to approach homeless people, ask them how they were doing, offer them a sandwich, and - if they were interested - start a conversation. We spoke with a couple of Christian homeless men and offered prayer for them. One of which, another man walking down the street broke off from his shopping and put his arm around us to pray with us. We ran into a family of a father, mother, and two young kids both under the age of three. We offered them four sandwiches and while we huddled over them to offer them prayer, a mother pushing her own child in a stroller veered off her shopping path to hand them a few dollar bills to help out. Most of the people we encountered we felt we made some sort of small impact.

Except for one. Charlie, Lauren and I approached one man and offered him a sandwich. No, I'm fine. Are you sure? Yes, I don't want it - I can't eat it without any teeth. Ok, well instead of a sandwich, can we offer you a word of prayer? Insert rant of how God doesn't love him and how essentially God's one goal in life is to make sure he lives a terrible life. None of us knew how to respond to that. In that case, we assumed that there was also a bit of mental instability involved. We couldn't argue, he was already yelling obscenities at passersby. We didn't want him to get more angry or frustrated with us. We left with a "May God bless you and know that He loves you," and scuttled off.

There were so many different people we encountered, nice people, humble people, scary people, who were all in the same circumstances and who had come to the wealthy Santa Barbara area to hopefully change their luck. It was incredible to see how little attention I had been paying to them. We were also thrown for another loop when Shayna, who had given us a letter before we parted groups, challenged us with a card that read: "You're probably pretty hungry. You can either choose to eat one of the sandwiches or to give it away." Of course, after watching all of that happen, we couldn't bring ourselves to eat one of the sandwiches when you could see a couple feet away a man eating out of the garbage.

The LAC! We couldn't take a functional picture if our lives depended on it.

We did also have one funny moment in our melancholy afternoon of passing out sandwiches. We approached one man who looked homeless, dirty, and was just sitting on a bench on State Street and offered a sandwich. He first unplugged his headphones that were plugged into a relatively broken and beat up media player that he kept inside a filthy Ziploc bag. "What do you want?" he asked in a gruff tone. We asked him if he wanted a sandwich. His response: "No thank you, I'm pretty full and I'm actually quite wealthy... I just look like shit." Yikes, that was awkward.

The Retreat

The rest of the retreat, we spent time as a group of the 11 of us at the beach and in downtown Santa Barbara. I'm in love with the LAC from Trinity. They're the greatest group of people I could ask to have around.

So, that was my weekend!