Our Weekend in Kake

I arrived back from Kake yesterday afternoon -- after a fairly turbulent, but not entirely nerve-wracking flight through a lot of rain.

In Kake our students and I saw poverty. We saw people were just scraping by. We saw the effects of addictions and abuse. We saw the community with the high suicide rate in Alaska. But we also saw a community doing its best with the hand its been dealt.

Our goal in going to Kake was not to do typical Campus Crusade-style evangelism. The people of this small community are probably some of the most evangelized in all of Alaska, with four or five churches in town. Instead, we just wanted to "love on" them. (I'm not a fan of the phrase "to love on," but quite frankly I didn't get enough sleep last night and my internal thesaurus isn't firing on all cylinders. So I may use it again. Bear with me.)

Instead, we wanted to communicate by our actions -- not by our words -- that they are a people God cares deeply about.

Here are a few highlights from the trip:

• Lap ball. Thursday evening we learned (or we think we learned; there were so many rules) to play this crazy combination of baseball and cricket. The local kids are ingenious -- they created the game to fit one of the only open, grassy areas in town. It was a fun time, and a great way to meet some of the younger kids in the community
  


• 4th of July festivities. Friday was, for me, the highlight of the trip. All nine of us from Alaska Transformation participated in their five-mile "T run" – a race all the way back to town from a "T" in one of the logging roads. We also competed in three-legged races and watermelon eating and pop drinking contests. And last, but certainly not least, was what we've been calling the "polar plunge," which involved jumping 20 feet off a dock and then swimming about 40 yards through the breath-stealing-cold waters of the Inside Passage. Now that was awesome.


• 3-on-3 basketball tournament. We hosted a basketball tournament, with $50 going to first place, and $30 and $20 to second and third. It was a hit, as far as we could tell, with about 12 teams entering. And roughly 50 people showed up to watch. My team took third.


• Sunday morning Salvation Army service. Scott and June, the couple who heads the Salvation Army corps in Kake (also the couple we stayed with) asked several of us to speak at their Sunday morning service. It was a great opportunity to encourage some of the local believers.

All in all, it was an amazing trip. Definitely one of the highlights of the time I've spent here in Southeast Alaska.

Pray for the people of Kake today, if you think about it.