Hydrating the nation: More Than Gold mission trip to London 2012

The astute among those of you who follow me on Twitter will notice that I was in London a couple of weeks ago now. This is one of those rare posts when I'm not going to apologise that you've not heard from me for a while, because after London, I spent two weeks in FRANCE - but I'm going to save that for the next post!

#TeamG2

I spent ten days in London, leaving in the early hours of the morning after the closing ceremony. I went down to London with a group from G2 in York, let me introduce you to them; Gav, Rosie, Radi, Jo, Garreth and Hazel. More Than Gold is a big mission network going on during the Olympics and Paralympics, in London and all over the country. When we arrived in London we had little to no idea about what exactly our team was going to do. Originally we were going to be working with a church called Grace in Soho, but those plans fell through, we did go to a service at Grace though, it was in a bar, and essentially it was G2, but with alcohol rather than caffeine.

But what we were actually going to do was the least of our worries as it was less than a day before Gav had to head home with glandular fever, leaving Rosie as our one team leader. I'll say now, she stepped up awesomely.

While we were in London we stayed in a Salvation Army training centre along with Salvationists from all over the world. It was amazing to meet so many people, I would now claim to have good friends in Germany, Canada and the United States. We had some great conversations about differences between church institutions and particularly the absence of any sacraments in the Salvationist church, including baptism and communion. I also had a really interesting conversation with a Canadian called Erika who grew up Salvationist and is now converting to Ukrainian Catholicism - it was good to think about the value of sacraments and what they are for; not letting ritual stand in the way of an honest relationship with God, but using them as symbols, for reflection and to remind us to be respectful. I have honestly taken so much from meeting these people.

On Monday, we were due to start with our mission work in Westminster, but what with our original plans falling though, we seem to have fallen through the net and no-one was expecting us. That was a pretty disheartening day, we felt like we were a bit of a spare part. Rosie was ace, got on the phone to organisers and they found us a team that could do with some extra people, so by the end of the day we'd got a team to join for Tuesday and in the end the disappointing situation gave us a good chance to think about what it was that we were there for and what it was all about.

Tuesday morning, we rocked up to Euston train station, ready hand out thousands of bottles of water. It was a really simple thing to do, but it was great to just be serving the city, giving them something they needed rather than pestering busy people. Every now and then someone would stop and ask why we were giving away free water and it was those conversations that were really encouraging. Later in the week we started face painting too, that was a bit more conversation prone because you're with the same person for longer.

It was a really good experience to just serve the city and be useful. Especially working alongside the Salvation Army, it made us think, as a team, about serving regularly and not just around big events - we're coming for you York!

Also, thank you to everyone from G2 who supported our team, financially and in prayer. It was great to be supported by such an awesome church!

Watch this space for a post about my holiday in Brittany,
Stay happy! x