(Disclaimer-if you are expecting a bunch of horror stories of devastation, there aren't really in here, so don't be disappointed-you were warned.)
We got into town on Saturday, November 10th in a flurry of volunteers & chaos. We pulled into this little city called Ocean Grove that looks virtually unscathed.
Here is a quick background of Ocean Grove-years and years ago, a group of Methodists got together to have revival meetings in tents. They were there so often, they just bought all of the land & moved in and started building it up. Today, the "Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association" still owns all of the land (not necessarily the property) and it's a little Christian community. The town itself is less than a square mile-you walk around and everyone greets each other. It's a quaint little city that is affectionately nicknamed "God's Square Mile".
So we get here, and there was A TON of people and not very many leaders to direct people what to do, which is understandable because it's the first disaster relief these churches have worked on. Day one was filled with a lot of standing around, waiting to receive direction, too many people trying to unload the same trucks and nobody knowing where anything goes, and things like that. Slowly but surely over the next few days, things became more organized. We got put up in this place called The Grove Hall Retreat Center, a nice little inn that we've been using to house volunteers. (Basically, where we are is the hub-right in the center of the 2 founding churches. So the teams meet here & stay here & eat here and every morning we send them out to work on houses.)
After a few days, our pastor from back home, Pastor John called us and asked us if we could commit to being there for 6 weeks. Because we have zero obligations until December 31st, we agreed. Then we became the minions!We have been pulled aside as floaters, so we are always running around doing the most random of things from sorting clothes to stacking groceries to airport runs to unloading trucks to being the go between between the volunteers and the bosses. Never in my life has the phrase "I wear many hats" applied to us more than it does now. I've been helping to keep the inn where all off the workers are staying, so if I ever want to get a job at a hotel I will be officially qualified, although I'm not sure I'll ever want to fold another fitted sheet for as long as I live after I leave here. Marc does more of the stuff that requires physical strength-mostly moving boxes and leg work. They are long, tiring days. I think we might be starting to become grown ups or something, because we go to bed by 11 usually every night, which is at least 3 hours earlier than usual! But in all fairness, we are up around 5:45 or at least by 6 everyday.
In the first week we were here, local people started noticing all of the food & clothes that were coming in, so they began to show up, asking when it was going to be distributed and thus began our thrift shop where people come in and in one section they have all of the clothes and then in the other are care packages of food and toiletries that our teams have put together. It went really well. A lot of the people who come are homeless, which is not what the intent was but it's who God brought us, so they were ministered to. There were a few people who came in who weren't homeless, but had just been wiped out by the hurricane, they didn't have much of anything, so we did the best we could to replenish their wardrobe at least and to feed them spiritually and there was a lot of fruit from it. At least one person got saved everyday. As the people came, a volunteer for the most part stuck with them and navigated them through the "store", which was an excellent ministry opportunity. We served them hot coffee as they waited in line. The volunteers were so helpful and joyful. They truly had a heart for Jesus and to serve Him by serving the people.
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the powers that be decided to shut down the "thrift shop" because there was a lot of abuse going on with it-people taking way more than they needed, reports were coming back of people selling what they took, things like that, so they decided to refocus our efforts & volunteers to strictly hurricane relief.
During the time our store was open, I was personally involved in 2 very awesome events. The first one, this girl randomly started talking to me, allowed me to minister to her, and we met up for coffee & to have a study together. It was pretty awesome!
The other woman, Cynthia, told me that she lost everything, not in the hurricane, but just the circumstances of like. She lost faith in God a few years back when her mother passed away, but her abusive father was still alive and since then, she's been abusing herself. I was able to share some verses and pray with her. Later that day, she came back and asked for me to pray for her again and she received Jesus! We hugged & cried & prayed, it was one of the finer moments in life for sure. Afterwards she told me, "I just feel like I have so much light in me" and "I'm feel like I'm really loved for the first time in such a long time". And that's what it's all about. In a long series of events, she agreed to go to a rehab program called U-Turn for Christ all the way down in Tennessee & left the following Friday. Because it's an at will program, she left after a few days, so please, please pray for her if you think about it.
On Thanksgiving day at noon, we headed over to St. Paul's Methodist church, who had cooked a huge Thanksgiving dinner for whoever wanted to come & specifically invited & honored the Calvary Relief volunteers. It was pretty sweet. Then we took off up to Newark, NJ (about an hour north) to visit our awesome friends we had left just a few weeks earlier. We stopped by CC Kearny to say hi....where we had dinner #2, then headed off to the Loaiza household for dinner #3. :) It was a really good Thanksgiving.
Now that the outreach center has closed down, we have slowed down a lot in the Youth Temple. A typical day in the life consists of breakfast, doing any prep work for the teams before they go out (ie, Marc gets them tools or we help them make sandwiches for lunch, etc), cleaning up around the youth temple, and general organization and prep. If a team has recently left, we clean up their empty rooms & change the beds, maybe wash a few loads of towels/sheets at the inn. I know, exciting stuff.
Here is some odd, yet exciting, news. We got in about 7,200 Klondike bars. I don't know why they donated them, but they're here for my eating pleasure nonetheless. Also, there are about 3 more pallets of various ice cream flavors.
One really cool thing about being here is that a bunch of people that we've met from all over the place come here! A group from Maine came down that we knew some of, then a guy that we met in Connecticut and even a group from Kansas! And on Saturday, a team from our church! Yeaaaaahhh!
Something God has been teaching us through everything is servitude. The first week we were here, there was probably about 50 other people here & they were awesome. A couple little things here and there, but for the most part, they were great. The next week there was also an abundance of awesomeness when it came to the teams. Dun dun dun, then came the 3rd week when we got people who were difficult to serve. They were needy, pushy, and not the easiest people to get along with. Of course, not all of them, but they definitely made my life more difficult than all of the other groups, and Marc felt it, too. However, we realized almost simultaneously, that God wanted us to learn to love and to serve those that we didn't want to, that we felt didn't deserve it, because that's what He does. It definitely wasn't an easy adjustment, but it got better.
That's really all I've got for you now. :) Check in later :)
No comments:
Post a Comment