Hanging out in Roswell

Good morning!

Its afternoon for those of you back in Michigan, but here in Roswell, we're enjoying a laid-back Sunday morning. We don't have the mad dash to Sam's Club to make this year, so we can move a little slower this morning, a nice change of pace!

We pulled into Roswell at 11:30 local time last night. Michelle did a great job leading the vans through construction to the apartments we stayed at (they were really hard to find! Other than driving three full size vans in circles suspiciously close to a bank, we managed to find them without looking too lost). Nick was awesome again this year and gave us free reign on 4 apartment/kitchenette type rooms that we all squeezed into. Every bed, couch and most of the floors were covered with people. Most of us got upwards of 7 hours of sleep last night -a missions trip first for us!

After quick showers and breakfast this morning, we all got go sit in the sunshine outside while Cameron, Cassie and Danielle led worship for us and Derek did a brief teaching on keeping our spirits unpolluted from the world and focusing on giving up selfish desires this week. There are jobs that no one will want to do on the work site, seats that no one likes in the van and co-pilot shifts that we'd rather sleep through. But, God's calling us to be better servants this week and to look beyond ourselves (and now I have Newsboys, "Way Beyond Myself" stuck in my head). Justin did a communion meditation on how the Lord will build the house, not us. We wrapped up our time at the Roswell Extended Stay apartments with cleaning the bathrooms and kitchens and packing the vans.

As I'm writing this, the guys are playing Hackysack outside the van (Jon and Justin proved that it is impossible to play if Jon is hanging off of Justin's back), Megan and Adam are playing their ukeleles (Cassie wouldn't sit on a bench and sing with her because Megan wanted to split profits 75/25, so its become a sing along with Rachel and Melanie) and Derek, Michelle, Scott, Joe and Mitch are pretending to do a staff meeting.  We're heading to lunch next (the McDonald's here is UFO themed, but we're all too big for the play place, so Brittani, Melanie, Emma and Stacie are headed for Sonic) and then we're headed to El Paso for the night. We have a major shopping run to Walmart and then picking up Jordan and Caryl at the airport late tonight.

I'm blogging from a tablet so far and the app is different than the interface I usually work with. I think I got some photos attached so you can see proof that we're still alive and having fun. The goal is to upload another post before we cross the border tomorrow morning. I'm guessing that we won't have the access to update while we're in Mexico this year since we're staying farther from the border again, but will update on Thursday with photos!

We love you guys!