Costa Rica Round 2!

As I sit here writing this I am roughly 45 hours from boarding a plane to go to Costa Rica for an ES Sports Mission trip. I am so excited to have the opportunity to go on this trip for a second trip! I have a few things I want to put here in writing about this trip to give you a better understanding of what we are doing and why we are doing it.

The first thing I want to explain is the name of our organization, ES Sports. The ES stands for Every Student. It is our goal to reach every student in the schools we go to in the small picture, and in the big picture we want to be a part of reaching every student in the world with a message of hope and the Gospel. The Sports part of our name is our hook. We use sport to get into schools and to created excitement for people to listen to what God has to say. This trip and last years trip have been basketball but we have a dream to involve other sports as well.

The next thing I want to address is the type of mission trip we are going on. Most of the trips people have told me about going on involve doing some sort of service. I have been on two that involve this by going to New Orleans after the hurricanes and the Los Angeles DreamCenter. I have sometimes felt that our ES trip is not even a mission trip because we are not serving in a way that most people think of. We aren't building homes or schools and we aren't digging wells. What we are doing though is reaching students with a message of hope! I do absolutely believe that this is a mission trip that has allowed me to mix two of my passions in basketball and reaching students with a message of hope and the gospel!

What do we actually do on this trip? It may seem like we just go down and play some basketball with some students to give them a smile, but it is much more than that. When we are down there we will travel to different schools and put on school assemblies similar to some you probably attended while in school. We use basketball as a hook and depending on the school we will either play their team or run a clinic for some of the students in the crowd. Then at halftime or a midpoint in our clinic one of us will get up and speak. Last year our theme was "dreams" and how you should follow them. We used that as a gateway into how God is speaking to you and how God gives us dreams and goals to follow. This year's theme is "direction". We will be speaking on following God's leading and not our own. We will also be playing some night games this year which will be more evangelistic. We are scheduled to play one of the junior national teams and at halftime we will have an opportunity to speak to the crowd and the other team!

A very important side note. We are not going down there without connections to already established ministries. We will be working with a couple of different youth pastors who are already in some of the schools giving "values presentations" reaching every student in the schools. We don't go down there with the idea that we will change the students lives in the short amount of time with them. We go down there and do what we do to act as an excuse or vehicle to get the youth pastors and leaders into the school where they can have a real influence.

The last thing is that I am asking you to partner along with us in prayer and to follow our trip. Each team member will be blogging daily about what God is doing through and and in us during the trip and leading up to it. You can read each player's blog at essports.org by clicking on the roster button and then on the player you would like to read about. I encourage you to read these and post comments as well. Thank you for your prayer and support. We leave June 13th and get back on the 22nd.

Will

Live.4.Eternity