Mexico has lasting effect on church men

Published 11:59 am Thursday, October 2, 2008

SNOQUALMIE – The men who went to Mexico last month from the Snoqualmie Valley Alliance Church for a short-term mission trip have a hard time explaining what happened there.

They can show pictures and list all the things they did, but they said that really only scratches the surface of what happened to the men who served in one of the poorest regions in Mexico.

“You can’t describe when you taste the dirt and you can’t describe the sweat and the heat,” said Bill Bedell. “You can’t explain the emotion.”

Twenty-two men from the church went down for four days. The plan was to build homes for residents of El Florido, an area outside Tijuana that acts as a kind of refugee camp for Mexicans who traveled to the border town from other parts of the country, but were unable to cross into the United States.

After a flight to San Diego, the church group piled into vans and stopped at a hardware store to get building materials. The homes were to be modest, 12-by-16-foot dwellings with little more than four sturdy walls and a window, so the men were able to get a lot of what they would need in the states before they crossed the border.

Once the men got to the neighborhood where they were to build, they met up with people from Caravan Ministries, a ministry in El Florido that organized the work trip. The group built six homes for families that owned one lot each in El Florido, no small task in itself since saving for a plot of land can take a long time.

While the homes were modest (no bigger than the House of Soul coffee shop the church runs on Falls Avenue in Snoqualmie) they were prized additions to a neighborhood where houses are usually no more than a ramshackle collection of scrap.

“You’d think you were moving them into a house on Snoqualmie Ridge,” said Sherwood Korssjoen. “It’s what people [here] keep their lawnmowers in.”

The men will say, however, that building homes, while a helpful activity, was not the reason they went to Mexico. Before everyone got on the plane they were asked to take off their watches. The men were going to leave behind the worries and distractions of their modern lives and time was definitely one of them. Being able to step outside their lives and look into the lives of others would give each of them a new perspective.

Bedell, who has been on similar trips before, said the power of building a home with other men and seeing the impact it has on a community is never lost on him. The trips he has taken have given him perspective on what is really important in life, and he is always convinced that what is not important are material things.

“You see people with nothing and they have joy, and you see people who have everything and they have stress,” Bedell said.

Seeing the way people live outside of the United States impacted the men in ways that allowed them to take off masks they wear to cover whatever emotions they feel need to be hidden, Bedell said. Discussions tended to be more frank and personal, and what the men couldn’t get off their chests at home in the Valley came out more easily during the trip.

“The more we confess our weaknesses, the more strength we get,” said William Johnson, who recalled praying with a family after their home had been finished.

With all that happened, or rather, all that was experienced during the trip, the men have been understandably at a loss for words to describe their time in Mexico. The best thing they can say is come along for the next trip.

“We went into the battleground together,” Bedell said. “We served in a foreign place together.”

* To share more about its mission trips, the Snoqualmie Valley Alliance Church will be hosting two “Great Commission Sunday” services on May 30 at 8:30 and 10:30 a.m. The church meets at Mount Si High School, 8651 Meadowbrook Way, S.E., Snoqualmie.

* Call (425) 831-4590 for information on the church.