Chicago

This past weekend I had a great trip to Chicago. The express purpose of the trip was a pre-trip meeting with the city directors of CSM to plan for our youth mission trip there this summer. However, I used this as an opportunity to have some fun, too!

I invited one of my friends, Alex, to go with me (he's going on the mission trip with us as an adult volunteer, too). Alex is a great roadtrip buddy (in January we went to the Liberty Bowl in Memphis together)... we have great conversation for the long car rides and he's up for a little adventure, even we have no clue what we're doing.

We left Thursday afternoon--stopping for dinner, fuel and our first Jamba Juice in Merrillville-- and arrived in Chicago around 9:00pm Central Time. One of the coolest things about our trip was where we stayed. We called a while back and made arrangements to stay with "The Jesus People." The Jesus People USA, or JPUSA (pronounced Ja-POO-za), is an intentional community of Christians who live, worship and work together. Started over 36 years ago, members of JPUSA live in an old hotel in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. Currently they have about 450 people living together, and through their faith community they support one another and share resources (like food, transportation, kids' education, bills, etc.) by the money they make through the businesses they run (roofing supply stores, coffee house, skate shop and even the large outdoor music festival, Cornerstone). They also run five shelters in the Chicago area (one of which our youth will be working in during the mission trip). It was great to see the place in action and hear them talk about what life was like living there. Alex and I stayed in the single men's apartments and helped out by washing dishes on Saturday morning.

(cross collage in the cafeteria)

On Friday morning, after devotions at JPUSA, we headed over to the offices for the Center for Student Missions on the edge of Northpark University campus in the Albany neighborhood. CSM is the organization that is coordinating our youth mission trip this summer. We met with the city directors, Julia, Kelly and Tim, and talked about what we would need to know to prepare for our trip. Because this is a larger group than we've ever taken before, our group will be divided into two groups for most of the project sites. So we talked about our city hosts, our ministry sites, transportation, the logistics of picking up one of our students from the airport, other schedule issues, and some things we wanted them to know about our group. They took us by the housing site where we will be staying and explained the challenges of accommodating so many students in the summer (food, bathrooms, fans, etc.). Then they took us over to Cornerstone Community Outreach, the shelter run by JPUSA for women and children, and explained about the VBS we would be running for the kids while we're there. Afterward we ate lunch at a Thai restaurant (one of the features of our trip is that we'll be eating dinner at local ethnic restaurants like this one each night).

After the visit with CSM, we got metro passes and jumped on the elevated train (aka "the L") into the city. It was a beautiful day, so we spent a long time walking around town and people watching. We walked by Navy Pier and eventually found ourselves at a movie theater watching "State of Play."

After walking around some more, we took the train to the Wrigley area, got some pizza, and found another Jamba Juice.

As you know, Saturday morning Alex and I washed breakfast dishes for JPUSA and chatted with people there til lunch. Then, since we needed to kill some time and it was a beautiful day, we headed down to the waterfront and sat and read. After a while, we made our way back into the city to find a good spot to watch the NFL draft (btw, I think Cleveland drafted pretty well overall this year). Right when we were getting ready to head out, there came a downpour. I thought there was a Jamba Juice pretty close so, while Alex went back to the car, I decided to go find it. It was not close. So about an hour later (and a couple miles, a hail storm, and being very cold and wet), I finally got back to the car with my smoothie. We stuck around a little longer to hear our friend, Brad's band "Suzy Brack and the New Jack Lords" play at the Bird's Nest on Southport. They were great, and I'm glad we stuck around to hear them play.

So, finally at 9:00pm (10 o'clock our time) we left Chicago and headed back home. Yes, that's right... we didn't get home until after 4:00am, and I was up for church at 7:30am Sunday morning! My meager three hours of sleep turned into a very long Sunday, but it all worked out and we had an awesome trip. In fact, the trip really got me excited for our youth mission trip, and I can't wait to go back to Chicago again in June with 19 teenagers :)