RIVIERA BEACH, FLORIDA – During High School R.E.A.C.H. Week, my team and I partnered with Christ Fellowship Missions and were used as the hands and feet of Christ.
On Monday, we were immersed in the Spanish Culture before we started our missions the following days. We had a guest speaker, Frank Toral, join us. He talked about his struggles in school and how he overcame them which eventually led to becoming phenomenally successful. He started his own law firm and later he started planting his own church.
Later that day, we had Latin food for lunch and a Mariachi band came while we ate our food! After our delicious lunch, we took a Zumba class and learned many dances.
On Tuesday we started our partnership with Christ Fellowship Missions. We took the bus to Christ Fellowship and did some food prep. We wrapped brownies and cookies, made salad, and cooked lasagna. We took all this food into their food truck to a church in Riviera Beach. We set up tables in the parking lot resembling a restaurant. We served the people in the neighborhood as if they were customers at a restaurant. With their hot lunch, we also gave them a bag filled with snacks, cans of soup and chili, and other kinds of food they could easily cook. This was an amazing experience. We all got to be servants for the Lord and learned how to be diligent helpers. “It was so much fun!” says James Rheinecker.
On Wednesday we went to a daycare center and started to prepare the building for us to paint it. We taped the walls, put tarps out on the floors and other furniture, and started designing canvases we were going to give them as a gift. After we prepared the building, we started to paint the walls. Sadly, this did not go very well because we got paint all over the floors.
The following day, Thursday, we had to fix up everything from the previous day. We spent almost the entire day scrubbing paint off the floor. Unfortunately, we were not able to completely get off the paint.
On the final day, we went to Miami! We visited the famous Vizcaya Mansion/Museum. We learned about the history of the mansion, and the reasoning behind the designs of it. This was very interesting because the owner wanted the mansion to look much older than it was at the time.
This trip had such a big impact on the students’ and teachers’ lives. We all learned how to have a servant’s heart. In Ephesian 6:6- 10 it talks about having a servant heart saying:
“Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not people, because you know that the Lord will reward each one for whatever good they do, whether they are slave or free.”
