Wednesday (Immersion Night)

Service Group 1:
 Today was a great day in the big apple. We started out in Brooklyn at a ministry called Agape Social Services. (Agape means "unconditional love" in Greek) Right as we walked in, we met a man named Jeff. He was always telling jokes.  Everybody wanted to work with Jeff. After cleaning up the building, we got ready to serve the meal to the people. People were streaming in, and food was brought to them, along with fellowship from everybody in our group. We left there with lessons learned, and friends made.

Service Group 2:
Well since you haven't heard what service group 2 (Jessica D, Jessica B, Hayley, Jamie, Ryan, Todd, Jeannette and MJ) has done the past 2 days we thought that we should let you know. Yesterday we started out the day by taking a tour/scavenger hunt through Grand Central Station. When we arrived there we were split up into 2 different groups and had places we had to find in Grand Central. We had to finding things like the Grand Central Market, and the Whispering Gallery, which was amazing. The Whispering Gallery is a place where you can stand in opposite corners with someone and just talk into the wall. When you talk the person diagonal from you can hear what you are saying. When we were done with our scavenger hunt we sat in the dining concourse and ate our lunch before heading to the soup kitchen we were going to work at that afternoon.

When we got to St. Lukes, the soup kitchen we worked at, we arrived too early and took a quick walk to Bryant Park to see what was going on, and then we walked back to start serving the people. When we got there we all grabbed gloves, aprons, and a hairnet. For the next hour we served meals to the homeless and got to say 'hi' to them. We only stayed for an hour, before heading to Times Square. At Times Square, Steve, our CSM host, informed us it was the start our immersion. He would be leaving us and we would have the next 4 hours to complete the ultimate task of using our $16 ($2/person in our group) to feed our group of 8 and at least one other person. Along the way we also had other tasks that we were to do. Once we navigated the subway to our destination, Aster Place, the immersion began. We started off by getting off the subway and sitting on the curb counting the numbers of taxi's we saw in a 15 minute time period, we saw 93 and checked one thing off our lists to do. As we walked around checking out the area of Manhattan we were in, we started to collect menus from 5 different restaurants who are from the 5 different continents (not including Antarctica). We went into a Korean restaurant and grabbed a menu. We would love to tell you more about the night but right now, we have to head to praise and worship.  Hopefully, we will be able to update again later on tonight.