By Carolyn Curtis
Join Bruce as he tells about the challenges and satisfactions of his mission trips to West Virginia.
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Disaster Relief can fit into both categories when DR volunteers return again and again to a storm-ravaged area to help with rebuilding… homes, businesses, lives, even hearts. Friendships form, trust increases. People once devastated by tragedy begin to see familiar faces once more, living up to their promises to come back, to help with the next phase… long after the government aid and the insurance checks have dried up along with the receding waters.
As the disaster subsides and the rebuilding begins, folks often confront a bigger danger to their well-being than any storm surge or 155-mile-per-hour wind: a future without Christ. And so the real Hope begins.
In this issue on how to plan a mission trip, On Mission introduces to you a new feature. It's an ongoing story we'll be posting on our website, telling one on mission Christian's experiences in West Virginia over several years.
Bruce Mundell, a native of New York now transplanted to Georgia, responded when floods in 2002 swept through McDowell County, West Virginia. Bruce's first trip was a life-changing experience. He found himself responding to on-going problems as well as the immediate disaster. He returned often, four times the first year, sometimes alone, other times with help from a dozen or more from his church or workplace. Even his son, Seth, became involved. In five years, Bruce has been back eight times.
And so what began as a Disaster Relief effort grew into a longer-term calling. Bruce began to care about the coal-mining region and its mountain folk. Eventually God nudged him to do more to help them. A mission trip turned into a mission experience, a pattern we see emerging in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Bruce's West Virginia stories will introduce you to people like Harry, whose combination work area and living space had been flooded out, and Ruby, mother to a Down's Syndrome son. Bruce tells them about Christ as he ministers to their basic needs.
In his own life, Bruce has seen the results of missions work. He came to know Christ when he was a 20-year-old visiting his brother in Spain who was serving in the U.S. Air Force. His brother had recently accepted Christ as a result of the work of an American missionary and had been praying for an opportunity to share the gospel with Bruce.
God responded in a dramatic way. Bruce had just escaped from a hotel fire in Paris with his life and the clothes on his back. He traveled to Spain to borrow clothes from his brother and got more than he bargained for-a testimony and a gospel tract. Bruce accepted Christ that very night.
When he returned to America, God's path led him to Georgia, where he lived at a Christian summer camp and met the woman who would become his wife.
Bruce wanted to serve the Lord, but at first he felt frustrated, thinking he needed to become a pastor or missionary or Christian school teacher to be effective. Yet he was skilled in working with his hands, having learned trades from his father, a bulldozer operator. "I was always the son who could be found with my little feet next to Dad's big feet sticking out from under a broken machine, trying to learn all I could about how things work and how to fix them."
Finally, Bruce realized that God needs his skills as much as He needs eloquent preachers. "God drew my heart to use my hands for the needs of people," he recalls.
Carolyn Curtis is contributing editor of On Mission.