Adventuring Week 10: San Antonio

I got to visit another Texas city this week (and no, it wasn't Austin). My church's internship program takes our interns to several day-trips each year to visit other churches and see how they run their respective ministries. Those trips were some of my favorite days during the internship, so it was awesome to get to be part of one again (even though I haven't been an intern for quite awhile...).

Before we got to the church, we got to spend some downtime eating and relaxing in San Antonio's Market Square. Even though I've been to San Antonio several times before, I'd never been here (though I've been to the riverwalk and Alamo pretty much everytime haha) and it was a really neat spot! Walking through these shops felt like walking through part of Mexico. They also sold the most beautiful handmade crafts, like these:

If you know anything about Mexico, you probably know how popular wrestling is (it's called Lucha Libre in spanish). Wrestlers in Mexico take wrestling so seriously that they wear iconic masks and costumes and give themselves crazy nicknames. As it turns out, Market Square had tons of these masks to sell and while they don't exactly fit into my wardrobe, they sure are awesome to look at.

After some delicious Mexican (of course) food, we headed to Oak Hills Church, where we got to tour their building and talk with several ministry leaders. I really love touring different churches because when you've been doing ministry at your church it can become so easy to assume that your way of doing things is the only (or right) way. But the more churches I've visited, the more I've learned that ministry is almost an art form.

Churches reflect the personalities of their pastors and community so they end up becoming beautiful, unique congregations that do things in their own style. As someone who appreciates different cultures, I really love the diversity of that. Because at the end of the day what matters isn't how many services a church has or how they divide their youth ministry. What matters is that we have what's really important in common. And the churches I've gotten to visit all have. Oak Hills was no exception.

Oaks Hills is also Max Lucado's church, so we got to hear him preach! He is one of my favorite Christian writers, so i really enjoyed that. I also noticed that his vocabulary in person is as great as it is in his books. I guess it must be a writer thing that I kept picking up on his alliteration! I'm an English nerd, I know.

To finish off the day (and this strangely long post) we had some burgers at BurgerFi, and they were every bit as delicious as this picture looks.

I had a great time exploring this familiar city, yet getting to know places I'd never been to before. That's the thing about Texas cities, they've got so much culture and different spots to explore. And no Texas city is the same ;)

#adventuring #2015 #travel