Because of the late night last night we slept in till 8:30 this morning - yippeee!! We had breakfast, packed up our lunches, and headed to the Basilica of St. Mary. Mike had created these cool booklets that we could read through as we wandered about the place. The focus today?
Why do we serve? It was great to break that down and reflect on our reasons for doing this stuff. Ask us about it!
Then we were ready to head to
The Source. We've helped here for a few years now, and it's just an amazing place. Read more about it: http://www.sourcemn.org/FALLOUT/index.html. One group raked leaves and headed over to
Hope Academy to help with second graders and to help with a sponsor mailing. (A bit about
Hope Academy: a couple moved to a rough neighborhood quite a few years ago. They started feeling guilty that we are to “love our neighbors as ourselves” yet they were commuting their kids out of the neighborhood for a better education than their neighbors could afford. Because of that conviction, they started up a school which now has I’m guessing 300-500 K-9th graders, most of whom are from the poor neighborhoods surrounding the school and who are sponsored by folks from all over.)
Another group cleaned up after sand blasters at the Art Coop/Fallout Shelter! Those of us doing that will never look at a beach the same way again - it was wet, cold and SANDY SANDY SANDY work! We got a lot done: cleaned up and dried 10 or so tarps, cleaned out a huge garage, raked, power washed, and a lot of other miscellaneous stuff.
A third group headed to the Joshua house: we worked hard on replacing a drain and had a BAD NEWS story happen. We were chipping away at solid concrete and broke through the actual pipe! (We were told it was somewhere else; and thought the cast iron pipe was a
rock. We're really, really hope that repairing it tomorrow goes well). Garry spent the whole day in a tiny attic crawl space working on wiring.
The day wrapped up with a fantastic dinner at The Source, and a trip to the Y to shower. Showers. Good. Back at the church, Alyssa, another alum, joined us and we hung around for some discussion, a bit more demolition, and some serious chair deconstruction. It's fun to have another work day ahead of us (the last few years we've only done one full day of the actual "work" part of the trip). Should be good!
Taylor took some cool photos today -
click here to view.
More photos - for the whole weekend -
here
Sunday wound up our trip quite nicely. Gaining an extra hour with Daylight Savings was a bonus - we were actually pretty much packed and ready to go by the time the church service started! Dan, Mike's brother, is pastor at First Covenant, the church where we stayed. He asked Mike to come up and share his story. It was fun seeing the two of them interact.
Happy thoughts: Peter (the guy at The Source) said we were the best group they've ever had. They have a LOT of groups that come through, so we're pretty sure they say that to everyone. But the thing that was cool was that everyone remembered us: "Oh, you're that group from Appleton!". We assume that's a compliment.
