Come Before Winter

Every year Greatest Mission Baptist Church goes a mission trip called “Come Before Winter”. What the church does on this mission trip is take all of the missionaries that the church supports an offering to make it through the winter out west. Winters out west are so much more violent than the one’s we experience in Mississippi. This year the church was able to supply 18 missionaries with $1,000 each. They also take the wives a ‘Christmas Gift Basket’ and make sure to pack enough candy bags for all of the children too! It’s is such an amazing and thoughtful mission trip and different from your typical mission trip. This year Lynn and I got to be apart of this awesome trip! We left out on a Wednesday and headed towards Deming, New Mexico! In Deming we stopped at Mt. Calvary Baptist Church with Bro. Steven Sykes, they had a revival going on the whole week so we got to sit in on their service that night. The next morning we headed out to Liberty Baptist Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico to give that family their gift and eat with them.

After that we headed to Colorado Springs, Colorado to stay the night on our way to Burns, Wyoming to meet Bro. Nathaniel Ensley and his family, they showed us around their little church and also showed us the building their church was thinking about buying! After we spent a little while

with them, we headed out to meet two other missionaries and their wives at a rest stop on the interstate.

Then from there we went to Fort Smith, Montana to stay with Bro. Josh McCraw and his family at Big Horn Baptist Church. We stayed there for a few days where we got to attend their Sunday morning services and also did a little bit of sightseeing and shopping. We also got to meet a family from out in Texas while we were there! After leaving Montana we headed for South Dakota, on the way we got to stop at Mount Rushmore, which was amazing!

Then, we headed down to where we met Bro. Ken Trivette and his wife Mrs. Sherry at Pine Ridge Baptist Church, there we also saw Bro. Jonathan and Diane Faucette, after spending time with them we headed out to Watertown, South Dakota where we stayed the last few days with Bro. Lamar and Chastity Wittemore. We were able to attend their Wednesday night service at Harvest Baptist Church. Bro. Brian Biggs and his wife and family also drove down to be in the service with us. After seeing these last few missionaries we packed up early Thursday morning and headed home! This trip was such an eye opener for me because it made me realize what true love and sacrifice looks like. Each of these families that we visited had packed up their whole lives and moved to a whole new place to share the Gospel with people who had never heard it before. These people are really thirsting of the Gospel, living in the Bible Belt of the world really makes you numb to the amount of people who don’t have the opportunity to hear the Gospel like we do. We have Churches on every street corner and they barely have one per town. These people have left everything behind to serve the Lord and we can barely make it to Church on time. This trip really opened my eyes to the fact that there is still hope for our nation as long as there are just a few people willing to try and spread the gospel, not for fame or money but for the longing to still see souls saved, and I think that how we should be even in Mississippi we should still long to see people come to God.