Urban Promise Outreach Testimony - Byoungwhee

Hi, my name is Byoungwhee Sohn, and I was one of the members who went to the Urban Promise outreach. Urban promise is a summer camp for younger individual children who want to hear about the word of god and praise and worship him and enjoy their time there at the camp.

Before the sign up sheet for the outreach, I was having my summer break just chilling out and at home, playing some video games, the occasional hang outs with my friends, and just enjoying the summer break, i didn’t really feel like doing anything this summer but just stay home. But my mother wanted me to do this new outreach that opened up at the church, and this is when it really opened up to me.

I thought at first for the other mission trips like mission Nicaragua, and how I would love to go on this type of mission, but my other consciousness was saying to me “should I really do this?”, “does God want me to do this?”, “will this benefit me in anyway?”. So I started to mentally prepare myself and pray to God that he can help me for this outreach, and how I can be able to serve him and the kids and the staff who also serve him.

There is another church where our outreach team slept and did briefings, and since it was a bit farther away from our Urban Promise camp area, the condition for sleeping in the other church was very tiring since we wake up at 5 am to cook breakfast and pack lunches and leave the church at around 7:30 to make it on the train to our camp. So this was very physical draining each day but this is like a wake up call to say, “you are doing this for God and for his people”.

At the camp we would take care of different age groups ranging from 5-10 year olds, so that we can each be focused on a few children so that we can share the word of God to each of the children we watch over and chat with them. While I was there my experience with this new community and the kids who were there at the camp, it was as if I was blessed by God who has given me this privilege to go to this camp and be able to share the love and care of God to the children.

After the the outreach and we got home, i was thinking to myself about how well this outreach trip went and how our whole team saw a perspective of how God’s love was with us and how he helped us in supporting the Urban Promise, and that how God can always give us hope. I did not know that I could get community hours for high school, so it benefited me in doing so. Even though it drained my physical strength, I believed that God helped me induce the pain until the outreach’s completion. I felt that the experience was very good and it showed me how God is always with me.