Traveling is my passion.  I love being able to see what life is like for other people; whether around the corner or around the world.  For the past two weeks, the RAD team has been able to experience “life on the other side.”  Our first stop was Townsend, Tennessee; a small town in the Appalachian Mountains.  It was a beautiful and scenic town surrounded by mountains, rivers, and deep forests of mighty trees of all types.

Although Townsend is known for being a huge tourist town, our team’s sole-purpose for driving the distance was to bless the members and staff of Church of the Cove in our four days there.  Church of the Cove is a small church of about 220 in attendance on a given Sunday.  Although still young, this church has already begun to impact its community in many ways.  It has more than twenty ministries that serve in areas ranging from teaching the illiterate to feeding the poor.  RAD was privileged to serve Church of the Cove by completing many odd jobs around the church.  While painting, building, and cleaning seemed simple enough to us it blessed the church in ways that we could never understand. 

Along with helping where needed, our group was in charge of the Wednesday night service.  Although we had practiced our skits, mime/music presentation, and testimonies more times than we felt were necessary, nothing could have prepared us for what the Holy Spirit had in store for us.  Only an hour before the service began, our group felt the Lord’s prompting to change things up a bit.  Instead of just presenting our mime, we paused the music briefly in predetermined spots.  At each pause, a member of our team would step forward and give a brief part of their testimony that was relevant to that section of the mime.  It was amazing to see the way God used each of us.  His words were spoken though us as we had no prepared speeches.  After our presentation, Rob took the floor.  He gave a brief message on living “outside the box.” 

The Lord truly had His hand in all that happened that Wednesday.  Not only did we feel His presence right there with us the whole way, but also we were also able to see His love and devotion to the church.  We all felt so at home at Church of the Cove.  People we had never before met accepted us and made us feel like we had known them forever.  That is the power of the love of God flowing through His people.