December 16, 2002
AT LEFT, 91-year-old John Barnette prepares gospel coloring pages for distribution with this year's Christmas stockings. One of his other ministries is to the impoverished who live at a dump across the river. Right: Martha Sloop packages medicine for distribution.
FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT:
Valley Baptist Retreat Center
___By George Henson
___Staff Writer
___MISSION--While many Winter Texans migrate to the Rio Grande Valley each year for the sunshine, one special group comes each year to help the Son shine.
___Retirees from across the country converge on Valley Baptist Retreat Center in Mission in October to spread the love of Christ until February, when they make the long trek home.
___That is, unless the bond becomes too strong to break, as it has for Don and Kim Wilkinson. A few months ago, the couple sold everything they had in Kansas and moved to Texas, where they bought a modular home and placed it on the grounds of the retreat center, a ministry of the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
___"We just felt this is the place where God has called us to be," Mrs. Wilkinson said. "He has just given us such a love for the people here."
SHARON HALE (left), wife of camp director Larry Hale, sorts oranges by size while other volunteers bag the fruit for sale to Texas Baptist churches.
___She admits, however, that it was hard to move and leave family. "This is our first Christmas away from family, but we have a new family now."
___Their commitment will help make this Christmas better for hundreds of poor families along the Rio Grande in the Mission-McAllen-Harlingen area. The Wilkinsons now supervise a clothes center that serves up to 100 people a day, not counting extended family members who receive clothes but don't come into the center themselves.
___The only rule at the clothes center is to take only what you need and come only once a month. "We want to make sure that as many different people as possible are able to receive a blessing," Mrs. Wilkinson explained.
___The clothing comes from donations of churches all across the country, and the rules the Wilkinsons use to govern acceptance of the clothes are strict. "If we wouldn't wear it ourselves or put it on a child of ours to go out and play, we don't use it," Mrs. Wilkinson said.
___Their pride in their ministry and the respect for the people they serve shows in the way they display the items available. Clothing is categorized and hung up as nicely as a department store.
___Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, people come to the center for ministry, but on many Thursdays, they take the ministry to the people. The volunteers often take beans to a place in Mexico where the garbage dump and the railroad tracks converge. There they hand out beans to the mothers and candy to the children.
___Wilkinson said the ministry is what brought him back for seven years and ultimately caused him to move to Mission permanently.
___"God has called us to serve these people. My wife and I know God sent his Son to die for us and has now gone on to prepare a place for us. We're just trying to take as many people as possible with us."
___The Wilkinsons have invited Hispanic pastors to share the plan of salvation in Spanish with clients at the clothes center. Recently, five people professed faith in Jesus Christ as Savior there.
___"In my retirement, I need a purpose," Wilkinson said. "I don't play golf or sit and play cards or watch television. This is a way to show people the love God has shown me. And I think that staying active like this may keep me alive longer.
___"If I was to hit a golf ball 450 yards or even a thousand yards, it would not mean anything to me compared to what I feel when I see the smile of one of these children when I give them a piece of candy."
___The Wilkinsons are one of about 20 couples who travel to Mission in their RVs each fall and work at the various ministries of the center. Each couple is allowed a free RV hookup in exchange for 20 hours of work from each person each week. And there is plenty of work to go around.
ANDREW Riley of South Carolina stuffs stockings with candy and toys.
___Some people process medicine samples for distribution through a medical ministry across the river.
___Most everyone works at one time or another on Christmas stockings that are prepared for the children who live along the river. Each year, pastors let the ministry know how many they need, and volunteers stuff the stockings with candy and toys.
___About 10,000 children receive the stockings, which are filled with donations sent by Christians around the country.
___The center welcomes individuals or mission groups who would like to cut and sew the stockings. Edweina Peroni, a Mission Service Corps volunteer and year-round fixture at the mission staging center, has a pattern she will send to anyone willing to help make next year's batch of stockings.
___The final touch to each stocking is a coloring page with the Christmas story in Spanish. John Barnette, 91, no longer can perform many of the jobs he has in past years, but he still can slice the coloring books into sheaves of love and attach the story of God's love to them. He travels 1,600 miles from his West Virginia home to do this service.
___Barnette's wife, Janet, said there is one thing that has drawn them to the missions center each year since it began: "It's our love of the Mexican people."
___She recalled the first time she inquired about helping. "They said, 'What do you do?' and I said, 'I don't know, what do you do?'"
___Ever since Dorothy Sowell donated the 27-acre property to the BGCT in 1989 as a retreat center, the Barnettes have found a way to serve there.
___One of the center's primary uses is as a missions staging center for church groups involved in missions endeavors along the river. The center provides a place for the groups to take their meals and sleep each evening.
___More than 15 acres of the property is a citrus grove, about half oranges and half grapefruit. There are about a dozen trees that grow oranges on one side and grapefruit on the other.
___Harvesting, sorting and sacking the fruit requires many volunteers. The fruit is harvested by hand, put on a plywood table with various size holes cut into it to sort the fruit by size and then packed into 18-pound sacks. The workers' motto is "Put all you can into the sack and then one more."
___The sacks are then sold for $3 each. Some Texas Baptist churches buy the fruit for $3 a bag and take it back to their churches, where the bags are sold for a higher price. The difference in the price is applied to church missions projects.
___Gene Daniel, a member of First Baptist Church of Richardson, was in Mission last week to pick up the first of three loads of citrus bound for his church, the BGCT and Annuity Board offices in Dallas.
___"The people look forward to this each year and buy it for two reasons--the quality of the fruit and the relationship to missions," Daniel said.
___Larry Hale, camp manager, said more churches could use the same approach to help fund their missions projects. Each year the property's citrus groves yield more fruit than is sold to churches.
___For more information about Valley Baptist Retreat Center, contact Hale at (956) 585-4393.
___
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