Reflections From My First Field Visitation Trip Alvin Lee NorthWind programs with the goal of them coming to know Jesus eventually.
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ugust 2023 was when I went on my first field visitation trip which was in Thunder Bay, Ontario. It was my first missions trip ever which was only a week long, and it was a positive experience. The purpose of this article is to share some of my reflections and learnings from last year, and a few things I’m looking forward to this year as I go again for the second time. As this was my first missions trip I wasn’t fully sure what to expect, so I built up some expectations about being able to serve God in a significant way, and I thought I would be able to feel like I could make a significant impact when serving in Thunder Bay. This was my initial expectation of how the trip would go, but this was not how I initially felt in the first few days of serving – more on this later. The Thunder Bay team I went with last year was partnering with an organization called “NorthWind Family Ministries”. They are a ministry that runs programs to help people who are living on the streets, which includes providing counseling and other various forms of outreach to the people of Thunder Bay, with a focus on the indigenous peoples. One of the main outreach events that NorthWind runs during the summers is called “playdays”, and this was one of the main contributions of the Thunder Bay team in 2023. A playday is when the NorthWind team goes to a low-income neighborhood to run carnival style games to outreach to the families there and invite them to other
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Each day from Monday through Thursday we would go to a different neighborhood and run the playday outreach event. On the first day I was looking forward to helping to run the playday and meeting the families in the community, and as we got setup and the playday started, many children and families came out and started playing the games. It was a good and fun time, and my contribution was simply running one of the game booths which the children enjoyed. I saw that the families really appreciated the outreach event, but at the end of the day after cleaning up and going back home for the evening I was having doubts about how impactful my contribution was. I felt as though I couldn’t impact anyone specifically and didn’t contribute all that much. My current experience was very opposite to my initial expectations, so I started having doubts about if I would be able to serve God meaningfully during the trip – I thought about this many times that night. During the morning times, however, we did have some spare time that we could use for personal devotions and Bible reading, and I was lucky enough to be able to use this time for my own personal Bible readings. On the morning of the next day, I did a reading in Mark chapter 5, and I felt as though the passage in Mark 5 came at a good time for me, as if God was speaking to me through scripture. Mark 5 tells the story about the woman who was bleeding for many years and couldn’t be healed by any doctors, but when she saw Jesus she thought to herself that if she just touched his cloak, she would be healed. She did end up touching Jesus’ cloak, and she was healed, which was truly a miracle. When Jesus was able to talk to the woman, he told her that her faith had saved her. What I took from the passage was to have faith in Jesus’ power – that God can make something good from anything that we do, no matter how insignificant we might think it is.