The fantastic thing about mission trips is that they affect not only those who are receiving ministry, but also those who are giving it. This morning, God laid on the heart of one of the leaders the need to pray over the students. We’ve been praying that the community would believe truth rather than lies, but each of us believed lies about ourselves. We spent much of our morning in small groups, discussing those lies and then praying for each of the students that God would replace the lies with truth. At the end each person verbally declared the following. “My name is __________. I am not (a lie of the enemy they had believed about themselves). I am (truth found in scripture) because I am a son/daughter of the most high God who died for me and covered me in His righteousness. God is always (truth about God that we find difficult to believe sometimes).” It was powerful to hear student after student proclaim truth and reject the lies they had believed for so long. Nobody left the room the same. While we had to be flexible about our ministry schedule we were exactly on God’s schedule. So who has been the most changed this week? The team or the people we have met during our ministry? With God, do we have to limit it to one or the other? While God has undeniably impacted each of our lives, he’s also used us to reach out to countless individuals in Dolton. There are the little boys who found new best friends among the team, as well as men to look up to. There were the teenage girls who opened up to us about their past and allowed us to pray with them. There are the community members of Dolton who saw Christ in action to meet serious needs at the parks and at abandoned houses, as well as the city and park department employees whose hearts were softened to the gospel by the tireless and cheerful efforts of the team on difficult projects. There are the pastors and members of New Community who excitedly served beside us because they know that the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. As one of the youth group guys who worked beside us most of the week said: “I’m going to come to this park all the time to play basketball. And when I do, I’m going to tell all my friends that ‘those Pelicans painted that fence!’” And that is a legacy that will last a lot longer than the paint under our fingernails, the blisters on our fingers, and all the sore muscles in our bodies.