Wednesday Recap

Day Two was a success! At the start of our day we had a lot of rain, which continued throughout the first half an hour we spent at our work site. We worked with an organization called BlitzBuild that is run by Willow Creek Church, but the specific site we worked at happened to partner with a house from Habitat for humanity. They were re-building a house that was burnt down a few years ago for a family who really needed it. Our job was to do anything their team asked us to do to help them in any way.
For safety purposes the minors in our group were assigned to specific jobs, which they had a blast with! Their job was to attack a gigantic pile of bricks and do things like separating the pieces from whole ones, to hammering off cement that covered the whole thing. Although they were limited to certain jobs, they handled it great! Every time anyone looked over at that area, there were plenty of smiles and laughter (which you will definitely see in the pictures.) Everyone 18 and above did a variety of different projects such as; putting shingles on a roof, to sledge hammering things, to pulling nails out of wood. Although our team was scattered throughout the property, we never lacked any encouragement!
I personally had the privilege of talking with Blitzbuild’s leader, Mike for a while about our team. He was asking about our church and what other kind of stuff we do as a church. But he also asked if any of us were on staff at the church and what variety of ages we had in our group. He was astounded by the fact that we were all volunteers and we had people anywhere from adults to middle school students. He was so impressed with how our students gave everything they had doing whatever job they took on. He was amazed that middle schoolers worked as hard as ours did without one single complaint! Do we have some amazing students or what?! Everyone worked their butts off all day long, and it paid off! Mike informed me that we got much more accomplished than he had expected we would do. As we were leaving we had the blessing of actually meeting the family that would be living in the house. You could just see the gratitude on their faces and how thankful they were to have so many people helping them out, even in the smallest ways. It was really awesome!
The day ended with some dinner, and our usual team debriefing. All the students and leaders were very blessed to have been a part of such a cool cause and to have helped out a wonderful family! Now, because of all the difficult, physical labor that was done today the team is pretty wiped out and ready for bed! We appreciate all the prayers and support from all of you back home, it means the world to us! So thank you! God is everywhere on this trip so far and each day is a new experience and a new adventure! We are thrilled to continue on this journey and cannot wait to see what God has in store for all of us tomorrow! Goodnight!
-Nicole