Day 2- Feeling humbled and grateful

Whew!  What a full day we had today. "Team Habitat" was able to hammer themselves out of a job today. These guys, and one very sweet gal (Sandra Jordan) finished framing the entire interior of the 3-bedroom house they were working on. In addition they finished the fence around the back yard and got the two exterior doors hung. The blue board hasn't been delivered yet so their work at this job site is complete. Onward to another job site on Thursday!

"Team CCSP" also worked themselves out of a job today!  They finished a roofing project, repaired some ceiling drywall and got it all ready for priming and paint, repaired some stucco on another home, and managed to fix a front porch on an elderly neighbor's home down the street. These two teams will also be moving to new sites as they got everything completed today too.

As you can tell, we have been blessed with extremely efficient work teams whose skills have matched up perfectly with the jobs needing to be done. Dr.  Scott called this a "God thing" at our devotional time tonight. We feel blessed to have been so efficient with our time and thankful to have been able to get things done so quickly over the last two days.

Today brought the La Puenta food bank volunteers to the church to pick up the donations from St. Paul's. They were absolutely overwhelmed at the generosity of our congregation as their food bank shelves were nearly empty. They have had to ration food over the past few weeks as supplies have been very low all summer. They said that our donation will enable families to eat ration-free for the next week. A humbling thought that our small church had that kind of impact after one or two Sundays of giving.  We were also able to deliver half of the beautiful baby blankets to the Alamosa Women's Resource Center today. The WRC works with low income and teen parents to help them with birth control, pregnancy resources, and aids in prenatal care. They weren't expecting our gift and were thrilled to receive the blankets.

We are all looking forward to a day of fun, rest, and relaxation tomorrow. Some folks will be heading home,  and others will be joining us for the rest of the week. Please keep our team in your prayers as we take a day to catch our breath and enjoy this beautiful valley. The weather here has been absolutely perfect and we are extremely thankful for temperatures in the 80's and low humidity. We hope our blog is keeping everyone informed and that you are able to get a feel for our work down here.  More to come tomorrow.

Day 1- Tired and Inspired

Today started early with breakfast at the church at 7:30 and then meeting with the leaders of La Puente and Habitat for Humanity. Our teams (3) divided up and headed to our job sites by nine in the morning. We learned that our efforts were going to help three separate families with varying degrees of help being needed. One of the two groups working with La Puente worked at Cindy Medina's house to repair her leaky roof, removing multiple layers of old and rotting material, to bring it back into a safe and livable situation.  The other La Puente group helped Kevin and Jaylynn Bierieger to bring their home up to standard for Jaylynn to have access to her home using her wheelchair. The Habitat group had a busy day framing the interior and digging post holes for the house they are working on for a young family of three. They were able to build seven walls and stood five-- a HUGE accomplishment for a group of six individuals.

At this point we are all feeling tired but extremely inspired by the lives we are impacting and our work with each other.  The food has been fantastic...... (If Amy and I do say so ourselves....), and our fellowship with each other has been filled with laughter and encouragement. We look forward to a good night's sleep and to what tomorrow brings. Keep sending prayers our way; we are proud to be here representing our St. Paul's family.

We made it!

You will be happy to know that despite torrential downpours we all made it safely to Alamosa. We were all quite surprised at how absolutely beautiful and green it is from south of Pueblo all the way to  Alamosa. We all had dinner "on our own" this evening and then met at the Alamosa First United Methodist Church to unpack cars. God bless Amy Abshire! She volunteered (?) to do the planning, shopping, and preparation of our meals for the week, so $883.00 later, we had LOTS of groceries to unload!

Dr. Scott led us in a short devotional before we all headed out to hotels, motels, campgrounds and the church gymnasium for the night. Tomorrow morning we begin our mission work with teams that will work on a Habitat for Humanity house as well as projects through CCSP- Christian Community Service Projects. We are all excited to see what God has in store for us this week. Looking forward to sharing this journey with you all..

Testing my "blog-ability"

Just testing the sight to make sure I know what I'm doing before we head off on our "Adventure-Alamosa".  Commissioning service at church this morning before we begin our four hour trek to southern Colorado.  Steve checked the weather there for the week this morning...... supposed to be in the 80's all week which should make for nice work days for our team.  Stay tuned for more in the coming days!

Martha