This is the seventh of ten blogging installments from my life-changing summer in Milwaukee. In this recap I review my sixth week of programming. Be sure to check out my postscript thoughts at the end! A logical place for such thoughts.
If you’ve missed any of previous recaps, flash back to Week 0. Also, check out what a camera crew produced when they visited our site during Week 9.
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Week 6 was interesting. Interesting in new ways and interesting in frustrating ways.
The week started with some chaos when a random thunderstorm threw off our ministry schedule. On Monday morning one of our ministry sites was struck by lightning and we had to divert all our volunteers to another ministry site for the day. We had to find some additional backup volunteering because another one of our sites — the one, the only GINGERBREAD LAND — is totally outdoors. And thus, my Monday morning was largely spent on the phone trying to secure said backup plans.
It turned out beautifully though.
I called a pastor from one of the campus ministries at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and she excitedly said my call was a total answer to prayer. She had expected some volunteers from another organization to help her out with some painting the previous weekend, but they didn’t show. And so she still needed an entire floor of her campus ministry’s house painted.
YouthWorks to the rescue!
It made me smile that we could come in like that and help her on this rainy day. The kids and adult leaders were fantastic and they indeed painted that entire floor. By day’s end she was so gracious for the help, and it reminded me that God is totally sovereign. Rainy day? No big deal, He had something just perfect in store for us.
So disregarding the fact that I kinda grazed the pastor’s car earlier that morning, it was such a beautiful day.
Now, getting back to Gingerbread Land (love this place). We did eventually return there throughout the week once the weather cooperated again. I love this part of my job: simply driving to our ministry sites and hanging out with the people there. I love Gingerbread Land because there are always people sitting on their front porches just enjoying life’s simplest pleasures. These spirit-filled people just have an overflowing joy. It will be legitimately painful not to return there on a weekly basis in just under a month.
Throughout the week I sensed a deeper level of spiritual apathy among our students. I mean, from week to week there will be those types of students. There just will be. But this week was noticeably harder. I have various theories as to why exactly this was the case, but alas, I’ll not share those here. These kids need prayer. They need to see that Jesus is real and is madly in love with every last one of them.
They just don’t see it; don’t sense the indescribable passion that Christ has for them.
To close the week our site director’s mom rolled into town, so it’s been refreshing to have a motherly presence about our team the past couple days. We all miss our families and friends and it’s nice to have an extension of that physically here with us for a couple days.
Man. Three weeks. That’s all that’s left until we return to Life again.
Will we be returning to the same lives we left though? Will everyone back home be different? Will we?
To be continued…
TMZ PS: I was blunt and honest in my last installment’s “PS” and I’ll be blunt and honest in this one too. If Week 5 was my favorite week of YouthWorks, it’s pretty safe to say that Week 6 was my least favorite. Or maybe “most difficult” would be a better way to phrase it? Week 6 was just hard. Monday’s crazy weather and car accident issues set a chaotic tone for the week, and it was just hard to stay motivated as a staff when so many of these students simply were not. Week 6 was an eye-opener: that for all the amazing kids completely sold-out for Christ, there are also amazing kids who either don’t “get” Jesus or are openly waged against Him. And these are all students in the church. Huge eye-opener.
And for the record, it is indeed painful not to see Gingerbread Land on a weekly basis anymore.
dissertation memes https://helpon-doctoral-dissertations.net/