Domestic Missions: Tuesday

This was our first day of ministry, and it was so crazy!

Our day started early, with breakfast at 7:45. We’d received our assignments the night before and were all so excited and nervous about our jobs!

There was an ATL (Ask The Lord) group, whose job was to walk around town in groups of 2 or 3 and ask God what He wanted them to do. There was a sanding and painting tables and chairs group. There was a homeschooling pair, whose job was to help out with the kids whose siblings were in college. And there was a campus group, whose job was to help make the campus college look nice.

I was in the campus group, and our job ended up being bigger than just pulling a few weeds. But I’ll walk you through what we did normally before explaining.

Our first job was to clean up the exterior of one of the houses the college students stayed in. This looked like cleaning up cobwebs, trimming branches, hacking weeds, and even cutting down a tree! It was supposed to take us all day, but we finished in an hour and a half!

Then we moved onto weeding and leafblowing a driveway. Well, we leafblowed the driveway and weeded the mulch on the side of the driveway. There were some nasty thorns to weed, and several people got cuts from accidentally brushing up against them!

Next, we had a pretty big job. You know those ditches lined with rocks that give water a path so it doesn’t flood everywhere. Yeah, we had to remove all those rocks, shovel out all the silt that had built up, then replace all the rocks in a way that people could safely walk across them.

This job was exhausting, but SO satisfying! I feel like we finished it pretty quickly. Maybe in an hour or two, not counting our lunch break half way through.

We were moved into another area to weed more things, but when it started sprinkling, we moved onto doing work that had to be done before it rained too heavily. Removing the rocks from more ditches! Sadly, we were unable to finish, on account of the rain pouring so heavily that the water was pooling above our ankles where we trying to work.

Then we moved back to doing more weeding, before calling it a day and ducking under a porch and attempting to dry off. Little did we know, our day had one last surprise in store.

The two guys who had been working with us all day came back from trying to gather our gear from the Polaris we’d been riding around campus in with shocking news. One of their houses was flooding!!!

They asked for a few volunteers to help, but of course we all went. The water was running down a steep wall like a waterfall, before pooling in the backyard and seeping into the basement door.

There wasn’t much we could do, but we did what we could. We dug an alternate channel for the water to flow down and built a dam out of leaves and sticks and rocks to discourage it from following its natural path. We piled sandbags in front of the door.

When we’d done all we could, we went back to the porch, dried off a little, then headed back to the cabins.

For dinner, we came back to the college and mingled with the students, and after dinner we stayed for a game night, with everything from Pickleball, to a game of strategy called Two Rooms and a Boom.

It was a crazy, fun day!