Week One... And so it begins...

The first week or so of our summer missionary journey has been quite interesting. Few are the weeks in which I have accomplished so much, and met so many and interesting people.
FSBC Lake Havasu (LH) really took great care of us, they treated us to Olive Garden for our first meal (softening us up eh? :P) and then we started the drive up. Patrick, the Matts, and I rode up with Pastor Bob, he is a really neat guy and told us several great stories (including the aforementioned Glasses/Peter story) and generally kept us entertained on the way up... Didn't even read my book (which those of you who know me know is quite rare...)

After we got to LH we meet our host families, Mark and Deanna were the host family for us guys, they took great care of us, kept us supplied with snacks and such, and even washed our clothes for us a couple times.

We sang during the morning service at church while Matt Howard and Patrick played their guitars, I think we did a fine job. After church we ate at the church's potluck lunch that they had that day. After lunch we went over to the Pastor's house and had a pool party, it gave us a chance to meet several of the church's youth, and to just hang out with each other.

Monday, the real work started. We show up and move materials into their sanctuary for the train we built throughout most of the week. We also were shown the huge pile of music we needed to sort, I have to admit that when we first saw that stack of paper (almost the length of my entire arm…) I wondered if we were going to be able to finish sorting in the week we had (we did actually only took us two days of near-constant work…).

Besides sorting the music, we also: built a train for their Worship Rally - complete with train station and signage for said train station, passed out about a thousand flyers to houses around the church, helped decorate several of their VBS rooms, Matt and Patrick played and sang at their Wednesday Youth service, and we even helped them clean up for their next Sunday service.

Needless to say, they kept us plenty busy, but I think this week was very good for our group, it gave us time to work all together as a complete team, and to get to know each other better before we split up to our various churches. We learned that even when the job seems insanely hard, or just very tedious, that if we stick together and keep our trust in God, we can do most anything.

Moving on from the not-so-brief synopsis of our first week to more spiritual matters. I really felt God moving in our group this week, I never saw someone just sitting around when there some something readily available to do (which for a bunch of college kids is rather impressive…), even when we were facing a task that seemed insurmountable people kept on going, and there was more singing that week that I have heard in a while, someone was always singing a hymn or praise song… and not just because we were sorting a bunch of praise music, even after we had finished we were still randomly singing… The spirit of worship was just continuously with us the entire week. God has already done some great things with this group, and I believe that he will continue to do so…

I know this has been rather long, will try to keep the later ones closer together but shorter. Then again, I like typing, so no promises on that account :D.

Thanks for reading,
Troy (Craig) Daniel