Ciera shares of her time at Operation Exodus

I’m Ciera and I was part of my church’s mission team who worked with Operation Exodus the last week in July.

I worked with the kindergarten class at Washington Heights all week. Our theme for the week was forgiveness, so with everything we did with the kids we tried to somehow relate it to forgiving others as Christ as forgiven us. One of the ways we did this was at creative time every day. While we were making our crafts we used the time to talk to the kids and to really get them thinking about who they needed to forgive. Some of the kids would tell me stories of how friends and family members had hurt them, but now they knew they needed to forgive them.

Praise time was probably my favorite part of every day, though. We talked about the story of Joseph and his brothers and how that related to forgiveness. I think the kids really enjoyed watching the skits our team acted out, and it gave them a practical example of what forgiveness looks like. Also, on Friday I had the opportunity to kind of wrap up what we had learned about forgiveness all week and show how the story of Joseph ultimately points to Jesus.

Overall it was an incredible week, but very exhausting and filled with mixed emotions. But as Christians, we live by faith, not by feelings.

I’m so thankful for the time I had to hang out with “my kids,” as I call them, and to get to know them. It’s been a week now since my last day at Exodus, and not a day has went by that they haven’t crossed my mind. I’m still missing them.