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Sunday, November 20, 2005

After a long, 13-hour drive all of us made it to the Pass. God was faithful and helped all 10 vehicles to arrive safely though spread out over a 1 ½ hour time frame. A blessing occurred even on the trip
down as Mike Zimmerman, the new volunteer coordinator at the First United Methodist Church in Pass Christian, told us that the tent village (see scouting trip photos) was opened up for volunteers.

We decided to put the guys down at the tent village, and have the girls use the church. We have used the church as a meeting place, dormitory, and breakfast hang out as well as a place to debrief and store tools, materials and other things we need.

Our first task Sunday was to relive Pastor Terry Hilliard and conduct the Sunday worship service. Joe Brockinton helped coordinate worship team, a couple testimonies and directed prayer. It was a powerful time as the group talked and worshiped with the 10 residents left in town that came to church. Sunday afternoon was going to be an orientation, tour, worship and logistics day, but our “be flexible” theme was tested right away as the feeding tent that we ate lunch at needed some servers…eventually the servers expanded to dishwashers and then 30 people who cleaned up debris on the site. As some of our group walked the two blocks from the church to “The Village” (ie tent city) they struck up a conversation with a resident down the street and ended up helping her “move a deck”.

Sunday night after a couple safety trainings by Mike Zimmerman and Marcy Thobaben, we divided up a variety of work projects for the next day and got a bright and early start Monday morning starting most projects at 7:00 am. Monday we went to about 9 different projects that people signed up for based on their interests. At around 8:00 pm we had an evening debrief, prayer time and then assigned projects for the next day.