Abby Nadeau
Community Editor

Imagine one week with no cell phone, no work interruptions and no outside contact.

For some this would be heaven, but what if no contact meant traveling thousands of miles to help someone you’ve never met or spoken with.

What if it meant spending 10 to 14 hours a day in blistering 100 degree weather doing manual labor?

Would you do it? Would you volunteer to do it?

Many shy away from such a demanding trip, but others thrive and even enjoy the opportunity to help someone else.

For 10 men from Crossroads Men’s Mission group, the chance to travel to Mexico to help someone else was exactly what they were looking for.

It was more than just a yearly good deed, it was an ongoing commitment they had been making for the last several years.

Men’s Missions

Crossroads Men’s Mission is a large group of men who work together to basically find someone or some place in need and help them.

Wayne Lund, a member of Crossroads Church, said the men’s missions group has a basic motto from Proverbs 27:17 “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.”

The group works on a variety of projects from something as simple as replacing a fallen mailbox to re-insulating, resheathing, and residing a home for a family who runs a church camp.

Although the group is based at Crossroads Evangelical Covenant Church in Forest Lake, not everyone belongs to the church who works in the Men’s Mission.

Beyond the projects the men’s missions do at home, they work with another organization called Merge Ministries for outside missions.

Merge Ministries will travel to specific areas that are in need and determine the extent of that need and what sort of help is needed.

Merge Ministries then connects with Crossroads to work out the specific details of the project and trip.

Five years ago Crossroads and Merge Ministries paired up and found the need for help on a church and a dilapidated playground in Mexico.

Crossroads responded and has spent the last several years building churches from the ground up, turning churches into hurricane shelters, and renovating playground equipment, as well as ministering to the public.

And on January 17, 10 men from the men’s mission, boarded a plane bound for Cancun, Mexico, on their way to El Cedral.

American Gringos

For many, the trip was their second, third or even fifth time working in Mexico.

For Lund it was his fifth and although he has enjoyed each trip he has taken, he once considered not going at all.

Lund said he had been debating about going to Mexico for a couple weeks and couldn’t make a decision.

But one morning, he woke up at 5 a.m. and had the song “our God is an awesome God...” in his mind and he couldn’t get it out.

“I got up and turned on the satellite but it was out,” Lund said. “It was out except one channel, a religious channel, and it stayed that way all day.

“I knew the big guy was talking to me.”

In his first year Lund stayed in Cancun working on a church that is now functional, but has yet to be completely finished. In his second year he worked on a church in El Cedral called Iglesia Bautista El Mesias d El Cedral.

Now in his fifth year Lund returned to El Cedral with nine others.

The group consisted of a high school student, a portfolio manager, a carpenter, a printing press operator, a caterer and five others.

The group’s mission was to continue working on the church and reinvent a children’s park that had fallen in disrepair.

The 10 men split in two, one group at the church and the other at the park.

Lund was among the guys who worked at a park that had fallen apart.

“The playground equipment had been broken so long that no one can remember when it was working,” Lund said.

He said that all of the climbing bars, slides and steps were rusted and had jagged edges sticking out.

“Even the chains on the swings had rusted through,” Lund said.

In order to fix the playground the group needed to get a few supplies which meant a two hour drive into Cancun.

Lund picked up items like paint, metal pieces and even borrowed a welder. However, the one item that really surprised the children and parents was the weed whipper.

“We were heros with that thing,” Lund said laughing. “The ladies would normally use a short machete to cut the grass.”

He added that as soon as someone stopped weed whipping a group of the locals would come over and see how it worked.

“They couldn’t see the line at the end of the whip that was actually cutting the grass,” he said.

While the equipment was being repaired by the “American gringos,” as they were called, the local children helped out by painting a band shelter that was near the playground. However, some of it did need a few touch ups.

“We’d get it (playground) somewhat functional and the kids would use it,” Lund said. “We could never get the kids to wait for anything to dry. Someone always sat on it.”

As one group worked on the park, the other was helping to build a church that would second as a hurricane shelter.

During hurricane Wilma in 2005 many locals sought out churches for shelter. From that idea, a local pastor decided to have all new churches be built for hurricane season.

—from Page 6

Lund said that the support columns are re-enforced with metal in them and the roof has extra layers of net and concrete.

Even though there was a lot of work to be done, it was not all work and no play.

Working side by side on a daily basis, many hours were spent in deep conversations. And, of course, some talk turned to faith and religion.

Lund said that technically there were four different churches represented in the groups, but the mission was about faith, not religion.

“We were all working on a baptist church and no one was baptist,” Lund said. “We talked about faith and religion, but not what faith is better than others. It really had nothing to do with a specific denomination.”

Lund said one major topic was the power of prayers.

“These people prayed for someone to come and help them and through a chain of events we were there,” Lund said. “It was wonderful to be the answer to someone’s prayer.”

Local impact

If building a church and fixing a decrepit playground wasn’t enough, the mere fact the group was in Mexico caused city administrators to take a closer look at the needs of their city.

Lund said that a local news reporter wrote an article about the men and the work they were doing.

“It talked about how much we did in the hours we were there compared to what it took the city,” Lund said. “The article wasn’t nice to the administrators of the town.”

Soon after a television reporter showed up and then the mayor of the town.

In the end the mayor felt a little pressure from the community to fix a few mechanical issues the city was having.

One of the issues was lighting. Many of the street lights had been blown out and were not working. One day a mechanical truck came by and fixed several of the lights in town.

The extra lighting came in handy by the end of the mission trip when the men’s mission group threw the community a “North American” picnic.

Lund said last year the group had the idea to throw a large picnic with food that would normally be in an American picnic and this year the group could do it.

The men started up the fire pit, cooked up 500 hot dogs and served them with chips and drinks.

And what picnic would be complete without games, a gunny sack race and the three-legged race?

“We made fools of ourselves,” Lund said. “Anytime we had the chance, we were goofy with them.

“We had so much fun just being there and concentrating on one job, for one week without interruption.”

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