worship, whales & nome

I’m in Alaska with a team from United Theological Seminary for 10 days. Enjoy the pics & some summary. Our professor’s blog gives more details. More pics here too.

downtown Nome

live king crab that we’re cooking for dinner tomorrow 🙂

$503 for a week’s worth of groceries & 5 air mattresses

milk is $7.49 a gallon

nome!

11pm sun over turnagain arm

rev. peter perry & seward umc

fox island

kristen, me and pam on the front of the boat!

umm…i love alaska

rev. david fison telling us the christmas totem pole story

I arrived in Anchorage on Saturday evening. Got to spend a little bit of time with my family and then joined the team from my school. There are 10 of us. Sunday we worshipped at Anchor Park UMC and went out for pizza. I got to sit between my parents in worship! Don’t think that’s happened in a long time.

We visited the Alaska Native Heritage Museum in the afternoon and went to my home church, St. John UMC, for evening worship. The new pastor, John Dodson, asked me to serve communion with him. What a joy to serve my seminary colleagues and church friends!

On Monday we headed south to Seward for a sealife cruise. We saw 10-12 humpback whales! It was an absolutely beautiful day. Was overwhelmed with God’s beauty & creation. We stopped in to visit Peter Perry at Seward UMC for an hour. Great stories & inspiration for ministry.

Today we flew to Nome. I’m glad to be experiencing a new culture. Living in Anchorage made it difficult to see it with new eyes. But now I’m in the same place as the rest of the team. There are no trees here, it’s very gray and depressed in many ways. But I’m inspired as we listen to people who work tirelessly for justice here.

More coming soon…