Traveling the Midwest
The Paducah Trip
by Quaid Ledingham ('05)

On the morning of October 7th, Sunset's AIM class of 2005 set out to begin a 2,300 mile journey that would take the class across many states and many adventures in the span of a week. This trip is called the Paducah Trip even though we visit many other towns on our way. The main stops on the trip were Paducah, Kentucky, Mt. Carmel, Illinois, and the World Missions Workshop at Harding University in Arkansas.

Our first site-seeing stop on the way to Kentucky was in St. Louis, Missouri. We were given a few hours to explore the city and some of us took a ride to the top of the arch. After we had stretched our legs and eaten, we loaded back up and rolled into Paducah that afternoon.

When we arrived, the church was having a fish fry that was open to the community in attempts to meet new people and make relationships to bring people to Christ. We were privileged to help out with many activities such as cooking, serving, face painting, playing with kids, and getting to meet new people. We were also able to eat a really good meal of catfish, hush-puppies, french fries, and hot dogs -- all for free. When we were all finished with the fish fry, we met our host families and called it a night. We stayed in Kentucky over the next three days. During that time, we had daily devotionals with the youth group and a couple classes with Mitchell Covington, the preacher at Lone Oak Church of Christ. We were fortunate because the local schools were not in session that week so we were able to spend time with the youth group in fellowship and through service projects. We split up into several groups for the different projects. It was really encouraging to see a youth group willing to help out with manual labor, especially on their week off from school. One day we were able to go to the Garden of the Gods to hang out with the youth group and see some beautiful scenery. We had a devotional on top of a cliff overlooking a sea of green trees, and we were reminded of the beauty of God's creation.

Our third stop on our tour of duty was the World Missions Workshop at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas. During the workshop we were able to attend classes and learn from missionaries that had been on the field for many years. There were missionaries from all around the world teaching classes, and students from all over the nation attended the workshop. This was a great opportunity to tell many people about the AIM program. After the workshop we made our way back to Lubbock to complete our 2,300 mile journey. We made it home Sunday night and began our new classes for the second term on Monday.