Chaplain plans mission trips for year
0Written By Eric Campbell
Chaplain Rob Musick will be taking a group of students to Washington, D.C. for the fall break mission trip and will be working with a group called The Pilgrimage which is a Presbyterian Church that has reinvented itself. The Presbyterian Church has people come in and experience spirituality through service. Students who attend the trip will leave on Wednesday, Oct. 10 and come back Sunday, Oct. 14. The students will stay in the church and venture out through the city doing community service with The Pilgrimage.
Musick hopes the students will have an understanding how quickly someone can become homeless in D.C. because of how expensive it is to live there. Musick also wants students with no experience in a city to understand the environment and what it’s like to live in a city. The students will visit places such as the large National Mall where the Washington Monument is located and go to the Holocaust Museum. Musick wants to break stigmas with himself and with the student about people who are struggling with homelessness.
“We live in this mindset that somehow people who are homeless deserved it, self-caused, or lazy,” Musick said.
Musick has taken a group of students to D.C. before helping the pilgrimage, and his best part about going on this mission trip was how diverse the group of students he took was. He had students who wanted to volunteer, some wanted to go because they never been to D.C., there were international students, and there were politically interested people. A homeless guy shared his story on how he become homeless to the group.
“He was a white-collar worker who ran into some medical bills that went unpaid,” Musick said. “He lost his home and ended up on the streets.”
This was an eye opener for the group of students because he didn’t meet any of the stereotypes and it’s now challenging what people think about being homeless. Musick wants the students to learn how fragile life. Musick also wants the students to have new humanity and sensitivity of people.
Musick will have more mission trips coming up for winter break when students will travel to Haiti on Dec. 28 and work on an elementary school. During spring break students can also go to New Orleans. Musick would like to help people who suffered from Hurricane Florence.