Turning lemons into lemonade is something that two of our Alliance Church summer mission teams know a little something about. When the plans to go and serve on a short-term mission trip in the Twin Cities and Los Angeles didn’t work out, both teams cheerfully looked for opportunities to serve locally. A potentially sour situation turned into a sweet chance to bless others in the Fox Valley.

The following letter was written by Jessica Tower, one of the adult team leaders for the Los Angeles Mission Team.

On Saturday, July 20, we left Appleton and flew to Detroit on our way to Los Angeles, armed with your prayers, our excitement, and our lessons, crafts, and plans for leading a four-day Vacation Bible School in the inner city at an Envision site with a church plant.

But God had other plans because we never made it to L.A.

After spending almost 24 hours in the Detroit airport due to the CrowdStrike Computer Calamity, standing in several different lines for hours and trying to sleep on the tile floor, it became apparent that we would not make it to L.A. before the last day of the VBS, so we made the hard decision to return home. Although we were tired and disappointed, everyone in the group kept such great attitudes through the entire “Detroit Delta debacle” and we still looked forward to what God would do throughout the week. We immediately began contacting various churches and organizations in the Fox Valley area to see how God could still use our team, despite the drastic change in plans.

Throughout the week, we served at three different churches, discovered a new ministry in our area, and had a chance to stretch some evangelism muscles in downtown Appleton. It was a full week and God was so good!

Two days were spent at Refuge Church doing landscaping, painting their parking lot, and cleaning in the church. One way we saw that God had prepared us for this was that the Envision leader in L.A. told us to bring work gloves at the last minute. We didn’t know what they were for since we thought we would mostly be leading the VBS, but we went out and bought several pairs of work gloves, ready for whatever needed to be done. We didn’t know that the work God had planned was in downtown Appleton!

We also helped prep hundreds of crafts and name tags for the Mission Church Arts Camp, which served about 600 kids this summer. They are a small church and Arts Camp is a huge undertaking, so they were very appreciative of the help! And we were able to help set up and greet for a funeral at Alliance Church in Appleton. Due to vacations and scheduling conflicts, they needed extra help and were grateful as our team joyfully jumped in to do whatever was needed. Again, we saw that we were available to fill a need that God knew ahead of time would be there.

One of the highlights of our week was learning about a ministry in Oshkosh called Bearing Precious Seed that prints and binds Bibles in dozens of different languages to be distributed by missionaries around the world. We were able to learn about their work and then jump in for two shifts to help collate, staple, trim, and box thousands of copies of the book of James and Romans in the Tetum language for East Timor, an island between Indonesia and Australia. We also helped collate copies of the New Testament in Tseltal, the 46th language they have printed, bound for the Mayan people in Chiapas, Mexico. What a privilege to know that our fingerprints are on copies of God’s Word headed to people we will never meet, around the world!

On Friday we were supposed to have some free time to go whale watching and the beach in California, so we pivoted and went to the beach in Sheboygan instead, the “Malibu of the Midwest” and the "freshwater surfing capital of the world”, practically the same as the Pacific Ocean, right? We made sandcastle whales, played mini golf, and walked along the breakwaters. Our team had really bonded, first in the airport and then throughout the week as we served in various capacities, and this was a fun time to hang out.

We finished things up on Saturday morning with a trip to downtown Appleton to do street evangelism. Most of the team did not have much practice walking up to strangers to share the gospel, so this was a stretching experience! We had a short training and then hit the streets during the Farmer’s Market and we were pleasantly surprised when God allowed us to share the good news of Jesus seven times with different groups of people.

The Alliance Church Global Connections Staff is thankful to the leaders and students who didn’t let the canceled trips stand in the way of serving joyfully. They took disappointment and turned it into something sweet and best of all they got to experience God’s plan and His goodness!