Tales from my mission trip.

As promised, here are the highlights of our week-long mission trip in South Los Angeles, working with World Impact. I’ll start with Day 1, and then I’ll post about Day 2 tomorrow, and so on…

For 5 weeks prior to going out on the mission field, the 10 members of our team regularly met to train and prepare for the task at hand. On Sunday night, June 26th, we headed over to World Impact’s Los Angeles office where we would be staying. We arrived and met with Dave and Laura, and they showed us around and directed us to our rooms. The guys ended up taking the nursery and the girls took the art room. (We were staying at their school facility). After setting our sleeping bags down and unpacking, we had a brief Bible study to encourage us and remind us on why we were there. After having Bible study, we debriefed ourselves on our schedule for the week, and we also assigned kitchen duties, which mostly landed on me, April and Cat. So, we were the cooks for the whole week. (Yup! Kiss me, I’m the cook! hehe). I had no idea that I can cook! And they pretty much enjoyed every meal that was prepared! Praise God! We didn’t starve, and we needed good meals throughout the week because of the amount of manual labour that we had to do.

Day 1: Monday

“Scavenger hunt”

The idea was to get ourselves familiar with the area that we would be working in. 2 hours of walking around, within a square-mile perimeter of 4 street-boundaries (Western, Vermont, Melrose and Normandy). We were given a list of items to look out for as we walked around. It was pretty eye-opening for us, since we had no idea that the area was really poor and desolate. And most of us had lived in Los Angeles for years!

“House of Prayer”

We were to help clean out what used to be the old Tropicana Night Club. Yes, you read that right. If you had been driving on the 101 Fwy for years, you would’ve seen that establishment from the freeway. We had no idea that the place closed down for years now, and it is now a “House of Prayer”. The story of how World Impact got a hold of that place is astounding, and makes you believe even more in the power of prayer (of the faithful). Bryan and the rest of the WI Hollywood team prayed for that place after it had closed down. Walked around it 7 times (like the Walls of Jericho), and on the 7th day, they raised their voices in song and praise. A couple of years after that, they found themselves using it as a worship centre! And the owner isn”t even a Christian! God truly works wonders. They are using that facility for free, and they can do pretty much whatever they want with the place.

Our task: To clean up the 2nd floor, which they call “The Upper Room”. It was formerly a private V.I.P. room, complete with a stripper pole, a stage, a mud-pit and vanity dressers all over. When we walked up the stairs and got to the 2nd floor, an eerie feeling came over us. The place seemed dark, and heavy, completely different from the 1st floor, which they had since cleaned up and used for service and prayer vigils.

Before we started cleaning, we all prayed for the place. I started praying and as I was praying, I felt the back of my neck warm up. It was uncomfortable heat. And I felt like someone was hovering over me. I thought I was going to start crying right there. My prayer got a little more intense as I realized that there’s going to be a spiritual battle for that place. This is spiritual warfare! After we prayed, we were ready to go at it and clean the place up. Bryan brought his CD player, and we were blasting worship music, singing along to the music, and praying while we worked. April verbalized what all of us were feeling at that moment. She said that not only were we cleaning out the place, physically, we felt like we were being cleansed spiritually as well. We kept cleaning and cleaning until we couldn’t go on anymore. After a few hours, the 2nd floor felt very different. It wasn’t as dark and dreary as before. Praise God! We were exhausted, but we were joyful because we felt like we did our part in preparing that place for what God has purposed it. We felt an ownership of that place, especially the 2nd floor, “The Upper Room”. We couldn’t wait to go back and finish cleaning it up.