Bloggin’ the 28: The Holy Spirit

Continuing our summer Bloggin’ the 28 project, Tompaul Wheeler applies the Seventh-day Adventist doctrine of the Holy Spirit to contemporary life.
Nearly every summer the past 15 years I’ve been privileged to
participate in a teen mission trip–first as a participant, then the
second year and ever after as a reporter–called the Ultimate Workout.
Since 1991 some two thousand teens and staff have built schools and
churches throughout Latin America. This July more than 200 people
divided into 5 groups in Ecuador, each building a church for a
community that had waited years for its own structure. But while it’s
impressive to watch unskilled teenagers build a church in a matter of
days, what’s really striking is watching the Holy Spirit transform
people–drop by drop, block by block, muscle by muscle, as attitudes
shift and people discover the life God intended for them.
In one
of the groups this summer, though, a few repeat staff felt that things
just weren’t the same this time as before. They didn’t “feel Jesus”
like they had in the past.  Translation: The group wasn’t as tightly
knit, so they weren�t feeling the same “All for one and one for all”
vibe. The reality was that this year the group worked in a gorgeous,
wide open banana plantation, surrounded by lush countryside. Most of
the time, Ultimate Workout groups find themselves squeezed into small
locations in towns or cities, with everyone practically tripping over
each other. In this spacious environment, the group naturally became a
little more segmented than it would have been.
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