By volunteering for a day, you are directly delivering help, hope and healing to people after disasters. Whether you're clearing debris, cleaning out a house or praying with a homeowner, you will transform a life. 
Every journey out of dark days starts with a first step. By putting together First Step Kits – hygiene kits for people in crisis – you can meet basic needs for people who don't know where to turn for help or hope. When Texans on Mission volunteers distribute First Step Kits, they provide a place for both. 
When a disaster strikes, people don't know where to turn for help. They don't know who to trust. When a Texans on Mission volunteer connects with them for the first time with a Message of Hope crafted by you, hope sprouts fresh. Find out how you can radically change a life with a simple piece of paper. 
In northern Uganda and beyond, Texans on Mission seeks to provide everyone with access to clean water and the gospel. You can make a Gold-to-Gold Gospel Bracelet to be worn to share the Gospel around the world. Perfect for your small group, Bible study or youth groups, each Gold-to-Gold Gospel Bracelet you create will share the redemption story of Jesus Christ with everyone who sees it. 
When a disaster strikes, people have often lost everything, including items they'd typically have to begin cleaning up. You can jump start the recovery process for someone by providing these items through Texans on Mission Disaster Relief. 
Texans on Mission assembled a “dream team” of volunteers to bring Christmas — and its Christ-focused message — to the Rio Grande Valley Dec. 13-19.
“This year’s annual Christmas in the Rio Grande Valley really featured a dream team of volunteers,” affirmed Sabrina Pinales, TXM’s director of missions and discipleship. “We had a group of 11 students from Go Now Missions, a six-person team from Watermark Health, eight members of Grapevine’s First Baptist Church, and a group of new and repeat volunteers.”
The volunteers concentrated their efforts in the Brownsville, Mission and Donna areas. It also partnered with two churches, Iglesia Bautista Horeb and Casa de Oracion Church, to reach into several communities, many of them with underserved families.
Billye Rhudy, of Coryell Community Church in Gatesville, noted it was her second time volunteering with the Christmas in the Valley event, along with her husband, Sam.
“Part of our purpose is to serve the community,” she explained. “And we want the community to know that Jesus loves them.”
The group held several events designed to benefit the communities they served. Volunteers did the following:
- Painted the interior of Casa de Oracion and built a new fence on its property;
- Served lunches to teachers and staff of local schools;
- Distributed Christmas gifts such as toys, warm blankets and food donated statewide through TXM;
- Built and assembled beds for select families;
- And the Watermark team held medical clinics for nearby families.
All of these ministries, Pinales said, “worked together to bring the Christmas message and our Texans on Mission brand of help, hope and healing to the Valley.”
Magnifying a church’s ministry
Olber Roblero, pastor of Iglesia Bautista Horeb, said the team also magnified the efforts of his congregation to reach into their surrounding community.
“Texans on Mission is helping our church and the community in different ways. First of all, they are helping us build relationships with the schools and the community and the church itself, so by doing that, we are showing Christ's love to the people who don't know Christ yet.
“The other way they're helping us,” he added, “is to strengthen the relationships that we already have with the resources they're bringing all the way from the north, from all over the place and from different churches, and putting together a team to be able to come here.”
Providing gifts for those in need
During one of the community distributions, the team gave toys, blankets and food to children determined to be unaccompanied immigrant minors from two area shelters.
For Rhudy, it was an opportunity to speak her faith to this special group. “Our heart is always with those who are disenfranchised and those who come across and don't have a home.”
Supporting improved health
The Watermark Health team provided health clinics two days at Iglesia Horeb. Team member and Physician Assistant Megan Landon, who provided consultations to families, said the team sought to “provide the community with resources to navigate the U.S. healthcare system.”
The team dealt with “complaints that patients might have, such as pain or chronic conditions that patients need to be followed up with, such as diabetes or high blood pressure. We're also seeing things like viral illnesses, coughs, colds, flus.”
The team saw more patients than the clinic’s daily capacity, she said, leading her to believe “that the people here need access to healthcare that is affordable or free, and it's difficult to get that in the U.S. sometimes.”
The Christmas in the Rio Grande Valley effort, said Landon, fit the mission of Watermark Health, a ministry of Watermark Church in Dallas. “We exist to glorify God and make disciples, so we want to make disciples of all nations,” she said. “By serving here, we want to share the hope we have in Jesus Christ and so we're hoping to tell people about the salvation and joy they can receive from knowing Jesus.”
Giving college students missions opportunities
Go Now Missionary Angelica Martinez, a student at the University of Texas–Rio Grande Valley, paused from her duties serving brisket lunches to teachers at Senator Eddie A. Lucio Jr. Middle School to share her perspective on the Go Now Missions team experience.
“We're serving our community and the teachers, showing our faith and expressing to them how much Christ loves them,” she said.
Building beds for families
Cal Vande Zande of Grapevine’s First was part of a team that built and distributed beds and mattresses to families in need “on the very first day. And that was by cutting lumber to dimension, cutting it all to size, and then building a bed to make sure that it worked, and then practicing putting it together.”
The team distributed and assembled the beds the next day,” Van de Zandt said, explaining conditions in the homes “varied quite a bit. Some of the homes were nice, other ones not so much. There was one room that we got into where there was just barely enough space for the bed, and it was very difficult for the people to put the bed together, but they got the job done.”
Claire Golema, another Grapevine’s First member, helped assemble and distribute the beds as well.
“I got to go out and give out two of the beds to the children and they were just so excited to have a bed,” she said. “I can't imagine not having my own bed or even my own room, and these beds were going into basically the first room you walked into in the house, but they were so excited that they had a bed, that it was theirs.”
Serving school teachers
Golema also helped serve lunches to school teachers, an act she said “really opened the conversation between them and the church that is across the street, that perhaps they pass every day and didn't realize was there, and so that's been a really good way to reach out to them and to help them to know that God isn't just in a building, God is outside of the building.
“I hope that they would see that God can change things, that He's relevant for their life,” she said. “I think that's my prayer, that people would see God differently because of what we've done this week.”