It’s Trips Week! To the layman, that means that all of our students from 7th grade to 12th grade leave school for a week on either a mission trip or a cultural trip. Traditionally, our 7th, 9th, and 11th graders serve at Show-Me Christian Youth Home, Sagrada Scholarship Bible Camp, and Bermuda, and our 8th, 10th, and 12th graders visit Chicago, New York, and a place of the seniors’ choice.

Trips Week 2020 was, of course, not able to happen due to COVID, so our amazing teachers were determined to make Trips Week happen to the best of their ability in 2021. Months and months of planning and replanning and more replanning took place in order to pull these trips together, and our community could not be more thankful for all the hard work our teachers put in!

When it comes to our mission trips, Whitefield feels it’s very important to build relationships with organizations and return year after year. This helps to insure that our students are doing effective, needed, and meaningful work on these trips. We are so thankful that this year, our relationship with Show-Me Christian Youth Home was able to continue. Show-Me Christian Youth Home is an amazing home for kids who have nowhere else to go. It’s an alternative to state foster care and provides for so many needs of hurting families.

Because this trip is always such a great experience for all of our upper schoolers and because traveling to a city like Chicago can’t happen right now, our seventh and eighth graders both got the opportunity to pack up their suitcases and head together to Show-Me.

After an exciting stop at Costco to stock up on provisions, the 7th and 8th graders have spent the week helping to clean, organize, and generally spruce up the spaces at Show-Me. There are even therapy horses that our kids get to spend time with!

One Whitefield mom, Adrienne Waner, got to help out with our 7th and 8th graders:

This was my first year chaperoning on trips week. It was such a special experience to be able to tag along for a day with the 7th and 8th graders on their trip to the Show-Me Christian Youth Home. Trips Week is something all of my children have looked forward to since they were very young and is one of the highlights of an upper school education at Whitefield. I was very impressed with the Show-Me organization and I am so grateful that my 8th grader gets to see first hand how the people there sacrifice to serve these children that need a safe place to grow and thrive.

Whitefield’s prayer for our students is that they would remember these experiences as they mature in their Christian walk. Mission trips can be spiritual battle grounds where faith is solidified and hearts are moved. We want to grow and graduate students who are able to see the world apart from themselves, who are compassionate to people with all manner of struggles. We want to lovingly help our students see how much God has blessed them with and begin them on a lifelong trajectory of being the hands and feet of Christ, tangibly loving the poor and the widow.

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