Sunday Morning
Drew and Jim did a great job leading the caravan last night
from Amarillo (which is not pronounced
Armadillo like many of us did last night) and we all pulled in around
1:30a. local time. Nick was ready and
waiting for us with a stack of room keys and a smile on his face. The students were great about grabbing their
stuff and packing in tight in each room.
We all slept hard last night– even the rooms where guys were
snoring. After a solid 3-4 hours of sleep and showers, all of us felt better
and ready to tackle the day. Nick even
included breakfast into our greatly reduced room rates. All of the students were great about getting
up and going to their scheduled breakfast shift and then packing up their rooms.
We spent some time cleaning out the vans ad repacking everything to try and
maximize the room that we have.
Then, we moved the vans to the back of the parking lot and
did church together. Mitch talked about
the four guys in Mark 2 that lowered their friend who was a paralytic into
where Jesus was in a house and encouraged all of us to be those friends for
people this week. Even if it takes us longer
to do something, if we can bring someone else closer to Jesus, then it was
worth it. We spent some time in communion
and quiet time, took a group picture and loaded up. Sunday is a slightly slower paced day. It’s only around 3-4 hours from Roswell to El
Paso and we don’t have to do a mad rush to make it to Sams Club this year, so
we had a little more time to wander around Roswell and then grab lunch.
After ensuring that everyone who has a history
of car-sickness had Dramamine, we loaded up and headed out for El Paso. It’s a windy road through the mountains into
Texas and it can be hard on some stomachs.
So far we’re an hour into the drive and we’ve only had one emergency bathroom
stop. We’re doing well!
Sunday Night
As I’m writing this, it’s about midnight here (2a.m.
Michigan time) and we’re supposed to be up and moving at 5:30a to get our day
started. There are forecasted windstorms
on Tuesday and Wednesday that will make building difficult, so we need to get
as much done tomorrow as possible.
Please be praying that the forecast is wrong! We know that it happens on a daily basis in
Michigan, we need it to happen here as well.
The trip from Roswell to El Paso was very easy. No one got sick in the mountains and the scenery
was gorgeous for pictures (unfortunately,
the dirty van windows didn’t really help with that. We have lots of great pictures of the fingerprints
on the windows with some scenery behind.) We did see the “Rio Grande” again
this year, which is the mirage that newbies on the trip almost always think is
either a river or the ocean. We managed to
get one person to believe us this year, but I laughed too hard and gave it
away. Whoops.
We went to Jason’s Deli here in El Paso for dinner where we
met Andrew, Jason and Andy who will be three of our site leaders from
Casas. We will also be building with
Seth, but we haven’t had the chance to meet him yet. We’ve been really impressed with Jason’s Deli
both times we’ve gone there this trip.
The food is excellent, the service is great (not many other places can feed 66 people individual orders in under an
hour!) and there’s free ice cream.
It honestly doesn’t get much better than that!
After dinner, we came to Park Hills Church where we’ll stay
tonight and again on Thursday night.
There’s another smaller group staying here as well – we might have
slightly intimidated them when we all came in.
The church fits all of us really well and it gives us one more night of
sleep tonight before we cross the border in the morning. We did our annual run to Wal-Mart and the
students did great! We got everything we
needed quickly, they were ready to go and everything was going fine until a
computer malfunction resulted in us waiting at the register for almost an hour to
pay. Once we finally got it to work,
this massive stream of students that had filled the front of the store filed
out to the parking lot and the assistant manager started cheering. It wasn’t until after we loaded everything and
everyone but staff loaded into the vans, only to realize that we forgot the
ice. (Enter
unanimous loud groans from every staff member and a mad run back to the ice
cooler).
We got back to the church where everyone pitched in to
unload the vans and set up their beds.
We’re all exhausted and ready for some sleep. We cross the border in just a few hours!
Monday Morning
Hola! It’s dark and
early this morning but we’re all up and ready to work! Everyone got moving this morning at 5:30 and
by 6:15, we were on the road. We’re
grabbing breakfast now and then headed to the Casas headquarters to meet our
site leaders and then we’ll be headed to Juarez!
The next three days will be full of building and serving in
any way that we can. We’re very excited
because we wound up raising an additional $1,028 to spend on gifts for our four
families! Cassie, Kelly and Emily spent
the Wal-Mart run last night picking out dishes, silverware, towels, welcome
mats, brooms, pots and pans, etc for the families and we’ll add small
appliances once we cross into Mexico.
THANK YOU to everyone who supported us and the extra gifts! These will be a huge blessing to the
families!
We will not have internet access until sometime on Thursday,
so there won’t be any blog updates until then.
But, we’ll be able to upload pictures and tell the stories of the week
by then. Please keep us in your prayers
as we serve.
Sounds like you are all having a very productive time! Blessing to all! (friend of Cassie M)
ReplyDeletePraying for you all from Biscoe, NC! May God work through you powerfully to build his kingdom here on earth! -Kjersti
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