This past summer, I traveled to what seemed like a completely different planet compared to the Dallas suburb I have lived in for the past 10 years.

As a member of the youth group at First United Methodist Church of Lewisville, I participated in a week-long mission trip in east Tennessee. When I signed up for the mission trip, sponsored by Appalachian Service Project (ASP), I knew this was not going to be a summer camp. We came equipped with hammers, safety goggles and work gloves. While working we wore jeans, sleeved shirts and work boots. There were absolutely no phone calls or texting unless it was an emergency. The purpose of the mission trip was to help others but also help us become better people inside, growing closer with others as well as with God.

As we approached Cocke County, I was stunned by the poverty around the town. Many of the houses we passed were rotting and dilapidated. Trash was piled up in yards, and shrubbery was overgrown. Despite the conditions of their homes, the townspeople sat on their porches and waved as people walked down the street.

The home that I would be working on was owned by an elderly lady named Junie who not only had lived in the home for 40 years but had lived on the same street her whole life. She was a widow and unable to make the necessary home repairs herself.  Damage from storms that had been patched or ignored over the years had eventually led to parts of her house becoming unsafe and uninhabitable. Despite this, she continued to make do.

I was able to meet her for the first time the evening before we began working on the house. When she smiled to greet us, her light green eyes lit up. Once we greeted her, she told us that we were free to come in her house at anytime and make ourselves at home. Junie also mentioned that on Friday she would cook lunch for us because she felt since we were giving a week of our lives to help fix her house, the least she could do was cook us lunch. The fact that she said this within the first 10 minutes of meeting us showed how kindhearted she was.

Junie’s house was a long, white trailer home. As we wandered around it, the ASP directors pointed out what we would need to do in order to repair the house as best we could. The underpinning was no longer there, which allowed water to run underneath the house and damage the foundation. We would need to create new underpinning with sheets of tin.  The rotted wood on the bottom of the house needed to be replaced because it was chipping away. Insulation needed to be installed to keep the house warm during the winter.

The next morning I woke up and I didn’t follow my normal routine of dressing in a nice top and expensive jeans and having to worry about how my hair was perfectly curled or how my makeup looked. Instead, I wore the grubbiest shirt I owned and a pair of overalls. When we showed up at Junie’s we went straight to work. We started with the underpinning and cutting tin, which hurt muscles in my hand that I didn’t even know I had.  Then, my friend and I worked on building a wood frame to go under the house to keep the side that was rotting standing. We hammered until our hands became so sore we couldn’t bend them into a fist.

During this experience of serving God through helping others, I was able to realize that I am extremely fortunate to have all that I have in my life. I really saw God through Junie because of how she would always mention that if she could do anything in her free time, she would go to church. Also, I realized how fortunate I am and how much we complain that we don’t have the “it thing” such as the newest iPhone, or the most expensive brands of clothing. These families don’t have anywhere near as much as we do. Yet people like Junie don’t wait for the storm to pass, they just learn to dance in the rain.