On Friday a few more groups went to London to walk the streets with people from Sanctuary London.
Part of this group worked at the ReStore in Exeter in the morning.
Another group spent the morning doing some gardening for a family who have multiple family members with long term health issues.
The painting was started at the transitional youth home, and the changes are dramatic.
Here is a picture of the start of the patch job. They did a great job, with a little help and encouragement.
Another team spent the day at the Goderich ReStore where they had fun smashing furniture not suitable for resale.
A few of the girls got to price items for sale at the ReStore.
A number of groups had the privilege of being treated to lunch by their work sites, this site got to eat at the best restaurant in town. They weren't sure they would be able to work that afternoon.
Here is the before picture from
Monday and
Tuesday when they just started laying the patio stones. The youth did amazing job, and the single mother is absolutely thrilled with the work they did. The finished yard looks great!
The interior walls of the Habitat home are almost up.
The youth learned that sometimes the biggest gift you can give someone is not the work itself, but providing a listening ear. The youth used a wheelbarrow to add a new layer of gravel to the entire driveway, as well as cleaning up around the property.
The work on the laundry line and platform was completed.
During the week the youth had passed invitations to the people they worked with and invited them to supper and worship for Friday night. It is another great way for the youth to interact with those they worked with and learn more about each other.
The youth were thanked by them for the fabulous work they did. And we are truly grateful for the people and organizations that opened their doors for the youth to work along side.
All week long Chris had checked that everyone was wearing their name tags when they came in for meals. One fabulous young lady had managed to locate Chris' name tag Friday night, and caught him for not wearing his name tag. As his punishment Chris was asked to do the chicken dance.
We all sat down to a lovely chicken dinner.
Mike from Sanctuary shared during the worship service.
The youth shared more God moments they had seen during the week.
Tonight's message was about "God’s good, pleasing and perfect will". Why do bad things happen to us? And how can bad things be part of God's good, pleasing and perfect will? Jesus
shows up in the midst of our joy and our struggles. Sometimes when
we can not pray, we need to know that the Spirit is within us praying
on our behalf. Sometimes when there is no good answer of why things
happened it is merely that God can show up and that we can see God
more clearly. Gil then shared 2nd Corinthians 1:3-5: "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.". We
can take the comfort we received from God in our time of difficulty
and use that to pray with them and trust that God will be there.
Sometimes God tells us to 'Come follow' but mostly he tells us to
'Go' and share about Christ. It's harder to go home and show it and
to live it than it is here at a week of SERVE. Gil told us to go
home, and that God goes before us. Often we want to stay; we like to
hold on to these moments. We need to sing to the Lord a new song.
It needs to be fresh and new all the time and we need to make
disciples of everyone, going into all the nations. God's grace and
God's love is for everyone! Gil encouraged us to go and demonstrate
what this looks like. God has you right where he wants you!
This gifted young lady from one of our churches signed the words to "Beautiful Things"
They ended the evening by signing t-shirts.
They also got to sign the banner so we have a memory of all the participants of Huron SERVE 2013.
