RSE Day 1

6/9/2014

Another early morning today.  Up at 6am and getting ready.  I washed my hair in my tub because I don't have my curtain quite yet to take a shower.  Looking forward to that though.  Did some writing this morning and headed off to the church.  There had some breakfast and sat with Dewey, Sue, Ryan, and Sam.  Nice to finally have some names under my belt (although I cheated with the last two there. already knew them from CSP).  Then we all headed into the sanctuary for worship.  We sang some great songs and then Michael and Sam both had some announcements for us.  We then divided into our work groups and got our supplies for the day.  We would be working at a house that one spouse had passed away and the other was in a nursing home.  The daughter would be there and they were trying to get the house ready for sale and an estate sale.  We got there and began to see what we needed to do.  Throughout the morning we pulled down an antennae, lean-to on the side of the garage, gate on the side of the house, scraped and began painting the garage, and washed the outside of the house.  We had a pretty awesome God sighting during the morning from Sue, the daughter.  She baked us delicious cookies in thanks for what we were doing.  Then at lunch we had our devotion.  It was really cool to hear the kids talk about sharing Christ and what that looked like and how hard it could be sometimes, especially with those closer to you.  Then we got back to work.  In the afternoon we finished painting the garage, painted the trim on the garage, painted the trim on each house window, painted the little side porch on the house, and lifted a desk from the attic to the main level.  It was so amazing to see all that we had gotten done and see the thanks from the people we helped.  We invited Sue to the dinner on Wed but she would not be in town unfortunately.  We got back to the church and just took some time to relax and clean up a bit.  After that we headed downstairs for spaghetti for dinner.  Once dinner was over we went back  upstairs and had some worship time along with sharing of photos.  There was so much work done and it was really cool to see what everyone had done.  Then we had a speaker, Johm, come up.  John is from Egypt and has a huge passion for missions and has done some amazing and dangerous work.  The story that stuck with me was about his friend Daniel who had been in Sudan and was hit during a terrorist attack.  They took him to a hospital that took 9 hours to get to.  There they had to keep him outside because it would be too hot otherwise.  They kept the dogs away from him all night.  What he said was three amazing words "Jesus deserves it".  He died later that day and is not resting from this world.  It is truly amazing the change that Christ instills in us.  That dedication to others and selfless nature that is our new nature in Christ.  We were able to discuss this a bit in small groups that we formed to get to know each other a bit better.  After a long awesome day I came home and went to bed nearly at once.  Going to be early tomorrow but I can't wait to see what God has in store for me.

Today I learned that some of the church terms we take for granted even veteran church members and youth have no idea what they mean.  It pays to explain each one just to be clear and at the same time you learn along with them.