Road trips for God. (In real life: first-person America).(Brief Article)

LACEY, WASHINGTON--Each summer, scores of young people from Faith Assembly Church fill their school vacations with activities that may not appeal to the average teenager. They take on difficult jobs, in hot climates, under unpleasant conditions. And often, they actually have to pay for the privilege of helping others. Yet every year they keep going back. Who are these folks anyway?

Would you believe, teenagers who have discovered that "'tis more blessed to give than to receive"? Teens who are actively trying to avoid selfishness and materialism, because their faith tells them God expects more of them. I know, because that's what my faith tells me.

My first trip with Faith Assembly was to volunteer with Gleanings for the Hungry in the San Joaquin valley of California. Gleanings receives contributions from local farmers of peaches and nectarines that are misshapen or discolored, and thus unsellable. The organization relies entirely on volunteers to process the donated fruit. To help with this, teens from Faith Assembly have, since 1986, endured a two-day drive down to central California in a school bus that rarely makes the trip without some mechanical mishap.

I went during my junior and senior high-school years, and can testify that the trip was often tedious and uncomfortable. Amanda Schaufler and Lisa McKenney always brought along a spray bottle to spritz their faces with cool water because there was no air conditioning on the bus. Six-foot-four Darren Montgomery always made sure to sit on the aisle--do you remember what legroom is like on school buses?

Our work started promptly at 7:30 a.m., despite our late arrival the evening before. We donned our old clothes and worked from dawn to dusk. We ran the machines that culled rotten fruit, turned each piece for accurate cutting, yanked out pits, and spread the fruit halves on pallets. The task of laying the sulfured fruit out in the field to dry usually fell on the men, who preferred the brawny, manual labor outside to the sometimes tedious activities inside the plant. By the end of the week, we had plenty of war wounds to show for our labors--cuts, scrapes, sliced ...