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! 

Weekend Update: Homecoming and Parents' Weekend!

Watch out Azusa, James and Suze are coming in! 

I had the wonderful gift of having my parents here this last weekend for Homecoming/Parents' Weekend. It was so great to have a little piece of home here (plus, ok maybe possibly I might have kind of missed them a little bit). 

They arrived on Thursday where I went to go pick them up from LAX, a complete adventure in itself as their flight got in an hour late resulting in me circling the LAX arrival terminals for a full hour while listening to Taylor Swift. 

From there, we drove straight to their hotel in Pasadena (one of my new favorite cities), had a late lunch at Jonny Rockets (classy), went shopping in Old Colorado and headed back to Azusa for the Battle of the Bands event that was going on there, after a late-night snack of Applebee's (I know, also so classy), the parents went back to Pasadena while I stayed in my dorm to finish up on homework for my classes Friday.

On Friday, we met for chapel where the speaker was coincidentally from West Michigan, now living in California and a good friend of my home pastor. What a small world. In a pretty crazy day, we hit up Target, Chipotle, my trainer's house to bake cookies for the football players (the life of a cheerleader), and practice. After practice we went back out to Pasadena and had dinner at Trattoria Neopolis - delicious food, weird waiter. 

On Saturday, we woke up late and drove back into Azusa for lunch at a BBQ lunch and I spent the afternoon getting ready for the game and rallying through the Homecoming activities promoting the game. And then my parents finally got to see me be a college cheerleader!