Week 2, Day 5

Good morning!

We've finally made it to our final day of the trip, and it's insane how quickly the week has flown by.  Anyone with tips to slow down time (or travel back?!) let us know in the comments.  Good lookin' out.

(That's an awesome picture from when we learned to crochet at Bethesda a few days ago. I forgot to post it!)

Yesterday we had a great day of learning about interfaith service.  We had the opportunity to go downtown towards the loop on State street and hang out at the office of CAIR Chicago, which is the Chicago branch of the Council on American Islamic Relations.  At CAIR, we got to meet a bunch of people who spend their lives trying to advocate for those who don't have a voice -- in this case the Muslim American community.  One of their main goals is to educate people and eradicate bigotry in America towards anyone, particularly Muslims.  We spent a few hours in their office talking about a little bit of everything, with the students having a chance to essentially do a Q&A session with the CAIR staff people and interns.  

After we left care we returned to Fourth for a quick lunch and went back out to walk down the street to the Sinai Congregation synagogue.  Fourth Church partners with Sinai on a lot of local projects, so we wanted to spend sometime getting to know them and how they view their role in the community as a faith based group similar to ours.  Heidi and Carol met with our group and had a great time fielding questions and talking about how their congregation lives out service in the community around them.

We spent the evening having dinner and meeting in our small groups to reflect about our day of interfaith learning together.  Group 4 led us in worship together, with the theme centered around service as love.  We had a great discussion about what we've experienced together in the past week, and we're looking forward to a great fun final day together today in the city.

We'll be posting another update late tonight before we return home tomorrow morning, so we'll see you all then.  To tide you over, I leave you with these gems:

Peace,

High School Mission Week 2

"This isn't it, we're on 2.  This is too noisy."