Welcome Help

On Tuesday of this week, our Youth Pastor, Seth, and ten members of the Lake Murray Youth Group, including the three daughters of our senior pastor, drove up the mountain to our house and worked for three hours. Four of the girls took on the laundry room which has been dirty, cobwebby, and unorganized (and not thoroughly cleaned in several years), and led by Janelle, the senior pastor's married daughter, did a wonderful job of clearing every item out, cleaning the entire room, and organizing the room as they returned all of the item. It looks super-spiffy now, and I don't freak anymore if I happen to drop an item of clothing on the floor.

E and another young lady (who both don't care much for spiders) took on some deadheading of snapdragons, roses, and Sweet Williams in my rear flower garden. T and Bryan took on weeding the same area out and clearing the footpath of weeds by hand. Seth, the youth pastor, and Sean, the strongest of the young men, each took a weedeater to the perimeter of our half-acre and demolished the many weeds to nothingness. J and B cleared out the very back corner of the yard, taking down the lawn blocks and stacking them on the cement slab and clearing away all trash and mangled toys from the corner, and then Sean weedwacked the area, making our worst eyesore far more palatable. I directed everyone in what they could do.

In three hours, they couldn't accomplish everything on my list, but our own kids can do a little each day. Today the boys spread pine straw along the freshly-weedwacked side fence line which will keep the weeds at bay, we hope. They also cleaned the porch which wasn't cluttered but needed a good sweeping and cobweb clearing. I managed to deadhead a few areas that the girls missed on Tuesday while E will be cleaning the microwave before baking cookies for the bake sale she's organizing for our town festival Saturday to raise money for the new drama club.

We definitely appreciate the helping hands of Seth and the young people who came up to serve others, something they do each Tuesday for various families at Lake Murray. I also shared my book plans with Seth briefly as the teenagers downed pizza, lemonade, Dr. Pepper, and delicious M&M bars that Janelle baked and brought. Spending $50 on pizza was a small price to pay for three hours of work by over a dozen people (including our four kids). And it's SO NICE to have a clean laundry room!