Hello everyone! My name is Jasmine and I’m one of the four CMT staff on Team Juan Diego. This week Team Juan Diego had the blessing of being in Cumberland, Kentucky with the youth group from the Divine Mercy Parish in Indiana!

We’ve all experienced immense spiritual and personal growth in this week alone. While most of us have been on a mission trip before, to be the people who are leading the mission trip, has Team Juan Diego depending on the Lord more and more each day.

 These individuals from the Divine Mercy Parish have invited me to a much deeper understanding of our God and our Lord, Jesus Christ. They offered new perspectives that I hadn’t been exposed before and a childlike faith that I didn’t realized I have lacked up until now. This was our first time leading a mission trip, so inevitably it came with it’s fair share of challenges. However, like everything else the Lord calls us to do in our lives, it calls us to increase our dependence on Him.  Everyday started with breakfast int the early morning, followed by mass. After daily mass we set off to our work sites before coming back together for dinner and the evening programming.

For this location, the mission group worked at several sites! The CMT staff and youth group were spread across the various sites and we were able to help several families. This week we began our work at the St. Stephens’s Catholic Church. This included repainting windows, doors, railings, and walls, putting up new dry wall, and landscaping.

Fellow CMT Staff Carly and I scraping windows before painting them on the roof!

We were blessed to have the opportunity to help with the food pantry that ran this past Thursday, which included a lot of heavy lifting, sorting bags and boxes after organizing the food items in each. Some of us also worked on building a car port for Fr. George, in addition to taking down a collapsed balcony and repairing a roof at another local resident’s house. However, our ministry is more than simply physical, it’s a spiritual ministry.  So while some of us where working on building homes and chapels, others were building relationships with the beautiful people of Cumberland, Kentucky.  We also made time for some fun and games, mostly centered around our ‘Olympic’ games!

(Here we have one of the small groups, Mother Teresa AKA MT, taking the win for this round of floor art by impersonating the Last Supper)

This week has been a week full of surprises and trials. However, it was within those trials that the Lord allowed for us to build endurance, and endurance proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint because the love of god has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us (Romans 5:3-5).
May God continue to bless you.
In Him through Her,
Jasmine