Our June outing focused on mechanical skills, opportunities to work with your hands, and redeeming a "broken" situation.
Our goals for the outing:
-Skills they can use now to create self transportation
-Uncover and cultivate interests in mechanics, assembly, engineering, troubleshooting, art
-Exposure to careers via tech school and skills training
-Unveiling how God restores a hopeless broken situation into a life purpose
To demonstrate this at a relatable level, we visited our friends at Redemptive Cycles for a starter course in bike repair. The kids literally learned the "nuts and bolts" of mechanics, different types of tools and how to use them, designing and crafting things instead of buying them, the engineering behind the bicycle, a brief welding demo, examples of metal art, and how Redemptive serves the community through their earn a bike program.
From Redemptive, we headed to Railroad Park for lunch and our Bike Build Challenge. The kids took the skills they learned and divided into 3 teams. Each team was given a broken or disassembled bike in need of repair. In timed trials, they repaired the bike and rode it in relay fashion to the finish line.
With the broken bikes as our example, we discussed how something seemingly broken and useless could gain new life through a redeeming process. If we had left the bikes as-is at the park, they would rust and decay or be scrapped. In the same way we gave bikes another chance, Christ offers redemption from our broken situation for a life filled with purpose.