Twenty Hillsdale College students spent their spring break serving the local community.
Courtesy | Rebekah Preston
Freshman Rebekah Preston stepped into a house just outside of Hillsdale and was immediately met by a shocking odor. Looking down she located the source of the smell — dog feces and urine on the floor. As she moved farther inside, furniture and other clutter in the walkway wrapped around her. Dirt and debris were everywhere.
The house was one of many projects Preston worked on while on the Hillsdale College spring break mission trip March 10-16. A variety of students and organizations on campus came together for the trip to serve communities in Hillsdale and other areas in Michigan.
Among other things, students helped Crossroads Farm youth ministry clean up after the recent ice storm, served at the Helping Hands Pregnancy Resource Center, and spent time showing love to the elderly members of the community.
“The biggest idea that I took away from that, that I think I’d forgotten was possible and I just hadn’t experienced in a long time, was being knit together in the body of Christ,” sophomore Caitlin Filep said. “Literally striving side by side for the work of the Gospel.”
It was an opportunity to help others but also to bond with peers according to junior Elizabeth Sible.
“The community that was created was a genuine Christian community where people were encouraged to be vulnerable and get to know the random people that they were put into groups with,” Sible said. “It was definitely a very beautiful experience for me personally.”
Getting to know each other meant sharing unique experiences. Filep recalled helping at Crossroads, where the temperature sat in the 30s as she and her group donned coats and shoveled rocks for a few hours.
“The physical exercise kept us warm, but also by the end we could barely feel our ears or our faces,” Filep said.
But even in the tough conditions, Filep enjoyed the community and knowledge that they were helping those who needed it.
“I didn’t expect to enjoy manual labor that much,” Filep said. “The people in my small group who I was working with made it great because we kind of just lifted each other up but also there was a lot of joy in doing a work that was totally dedicated to God.”
The work went to help people who are close in proximity to the students, though most students don’t interact with them regularly.
“I think it is a great way for college students to serve and love people who live right down the street from their dorms and classrooms,” said Brock Lutz, director of health services. “Short term missions trips are great, but it is potentially more impactful to serve locally in an ongoing manner.”
On a typical day students would wake up around 7 a.m. at the Hillsdale Free Methodist Church where Adam Rick, Hillsdale College’s chaplain, would lead the group in morning devotion and hymns around 8:30 a.m. Afterwards, groups would head to their first projects, return for lunch at the church, and then head back out for more projects. In the evenings, local churches hosted participants for dinners, devotions, and worship.
“They were very gracious to provide us a meal and a devotion from a member of their congregation or the pastor,” Sible said. “We did a worship session and then ended it out kind of in small groups, debriefing the day and what we experienced, and then played games, went to bed, and did it all again.”
Though the trip is now over, some students are trying to keep their efforts going by continuing to work in the communities they visited on the mission — St. Paul’s Ability Resource Center, for example, which supports individuals with developmental disabilities.
“I have heard of some of the students planning on doing mall evangelism, visiting the jail, and also SPARC,” Lutz said. “Let me say, there are many churches in the community who have amazing opportunities to serve our local community. Students should take advantage of those things.”
These kinds of opportunities benefit the community, but they can also greatly influence those who are providing the assistance, according to Preston. For her, the spring break mission trip and community it created helped her learn to have a heart for service even when it is difficult.
The old house that she struggled to want to work in, she now remembers for the opportunity it was to make a difference in someone’s life, changing her own heart when looking at those situations, she said.
“It’s having a heart to serve people who you don’t necessarily want to serve and you’re definitely not excited to serve but you need to be excited to help them as people,” Preston said. “It was definitely a big heart change there.”
