Tiger Athletic Missions Experience Blog

Day 8 Blog
Davis Van Gemerden
Freshman (Pensacola, Fla.)
Thursday, January 10, 2019

"We started Thursday off with an inspiring devotional lead by a local Baptist pastor from Vienna.  He delivered a great message from Luke 5 in reference to Jesus calling us to be 'fishers of men.' It reminded me of the statue we have at ETBU with Jesus standing and holding the fishing net challenging us all to step into the deep waters and share our faith with others, even when it is not the easy thing to do.

After the morning devotional, we headed across town to the rink for practice.  Today for practice we had a professional, Slovakian skating coach work with us for the first half of practice.  He has worked with a number of NHL and other professional hockey players as well as professional figure skaters. He gave us a lot of good skating exercises that we will be able to continue to use as we go back home to Texas.  

In the afternoon, we split up into four groups again and my group went to a homeless community with "Christians in the City."  This was a little community of old sheds that people actually live in without running water or electricity. The condition of some of these were so bad that I could not believe people were living and sleeping in them. It was nice to be able to give them candles and gloves to hopefully help them stay warm at night. The other groups of ETBU players worked at another homeless shelter in the afternoon and two of the groups served dinner to homeless people in the city.

We live such blessed lives and it is amazing to see how much God has given us compared to the people we are helping."