Youth Group Trip to Montreal - The trip that almost wasn't

For the past couple of years I've taken a group of Youth to the Montreal Seafarer Centre around Nov/Dec. I do this in conjunction with the delivery of Parcels that are prepared by our church for those on ships during the Christmas season. Many other CRC's also prepare gifts. In the past the gifts were quietly taken by one or two members of Calvin to the Centre. I thought it would be nice for our young people to see just what this Centre is all about. What better way to do that than when the gifts need to go there. This has worked quite well. Above you see those who went this time around, along with myself, Chad, Janine and their son Ethan. We loaded 65 parcels and ourselves into two vans and left the Calvin parking lot by 3:45 pm this past Sunday.

Though we may be a smaller group, we get along well, and are continuing to build relationships together. Here, two buddies, Sam and Shawn greet you. In the background you get a profile of Megan, and her friend Hannah is behind Shawn. Lots of talking takes place on trips like this. Topics like MATH, movies, music, and MATH come up alot.

I am an organized kind of person, (ok, at times a control freak actually!) so I had planned that we would arrive in Montreal by 6:00 pm and then spend two hours as the centre, and leave by 8 pm to be back home by 10 pm. Those were my plans anyway. God had something else in mind. Just before 6:00 pm, about 10 minutes from our destination, traffic came to a screeching halt. Seems a transport truck jumped the highway on a bridge and plunged into a river. We were stuck for 2 hours in this mess. Not much we could do except continue to socialize. Shawn showed me something new last night. Apparently you can get an attachment for the Ipod that acts like an FM transmitter to your radio. He plugged it into one of my auxiliary DC connections, I set the dial to 88.1 and presto, we have all kinds of music at our disposal. Chad's van was right behind us, and apparently they could also get this music in their van (provided they stayed within 20 ft of my back bumper). So, for 2 hours we listened to music, laughed, and learned more about each other.

We arrived at the Seafarer Centre at 8:30 pm. Here you see us unloading the parcels to the centre.

Chad working hard, as usual.

Each time we come, Michelle, the CRC Chaplain at the Centre, takes some time to explain to us what goes on there. It's always informative, and this year there were many more questions to her than there have been in previous years.

The place was hopping with seafarers, which was really neat to see, but disappointing for us in that we couldn't stay long due to bad weather approaching and it already being 1 hour past the original time we should have left.

Here you see us taking some time to listen to Michelle. Chad really got into the Q & A time. He, along with all of us, would really have liked to have stayed longer. We hope we can do that next year. Once again I learned that God sometimes has other things in mind when we make our plans. We grew as a group, and maybe that was what God really wanted from us in this trip. I was thankful that those who came did so because they wanted to. I only hope we can once again return to Montreal and spend some time getting to know those who come through the doors of a great ministry supported by many CRC's in the Eastern Ontario area and beyond.