HYC Vancouver: Continuing the Impact on the Plane

God works through HOPE Youth Corps in many different ways. Read Anna’s story and the miracle God performed on the plane ride back from HYC :

My name is Anna Fenstermacher and I’d like to share about the ways that God moved in my life and the lives around me these past few months.

The summer of 2015, while serving on HOPE Youth Corps in Austin, Texas, we built safe and stable homes for families who couldn’t afford to get on their feet. We dug holes in hundred-degree weather. This challenged each individual in a different way to give up their own desires and put their trust and hope in God. After experiencing this environment of physical reliance on God, it was on my heart to apply for HOPE Youth Corps again the summer of 2016. God orchestrated for myself and 20 other volunteers from across America to serve in Vancouver, Canada; working to better the homeless community and connect to the Vancouver Church of Christ.

Not only does HOPE Youth Corps bring together volunteers from across the world to serve God, but it challenges each individual person in a unique way to grow in their trust and relationship with God. Each person on this trip had to step over the line of fear to bring hope and light to the world that stood before us. For me to take a leap of faith, I had to surrender my own desires and let God use me. David Louis and Marin Lusk, our site leaders, brought us together each morning and night-opening up each time together with a prayer. As we communicated with God, we gave up our fears, we told Him about our dreams for Vancouver, we reflected on the ways that He moved in that day, and ultimately we put our trust in His strength.

This young man ended up sitting down in the chair next to the seat that I was assigned to. Immediately noticing his Chinese passport, I simply asked what he was doing on a Canadian airline. By asking a simple question, God set before me an opportunity to share about the ways that God moved in my life and the places that He had taken me that previous week. The opportunities continued to unfold before me, and God led me to opening up the Bible and showing him scriptures. With a slight language barrier, this young man eventually took the Bible from me and read it word for word, following each sentence with his finger. The eagerness to understand a book that he had never read before and attentiveness to the things that I shared amazed me. At one point -I admit -I fell asleep while he continued to flip through the pages of the Bible, and yet God was still at work. It ended up that myself and this young man named Jasper were going to the same university - the University of Illinois at Chicago - in the fall for the first time. I had not yet met the campus ministry that I was going into, but I knew that this new family would not only take care of me, but would also take care of Jasper. Trusting that God had a plan for both of us meeting, I simply invited him to join us for a devotional the next Friday.

In under a month, the brothers in the downtown ministry befriended him, studied the Bible with him, and on the 25th of September, he declared Jesus as his Lord and Savior. He knocked and the door was answered. He searched and he found the love of Christ. God places each of us where we are for a reason. By taking the opportunities that God places around us, and through faith, being confident in the salvation we hope for and assured in the ways that God works behind the scenes, a hope and a light shines in this dark world.

“We love because he first loved us.” 1 John 4:19