Second Day at the Work Sites - Day 7

Today we woke up to a great breakfast prepared by Jenny's family group. It included fresh cut strawberries, bagels, cereal, ham biscuits, and some leftover breakfast casserole. We ate together and had a morning devotion prepared by Emma's family group, which consisted of a puppet show where we learned to help one another and to look over our differences since we are all children of God.

We reunited with the District Superintendents and went off to the work site, this time with the "knowledge" of how to put the floor planks together. When we first arrived, it was raining pretty hard so the District Superintendents needed a little encouragement to leave their warm, dry vehicle for the cold, damp working weather.

We took the opportunity this morning to present the District Superintendents with Voices of Youth t-shirts as well as the same crosses that we had been commissioned with back at Orientation. They were grateful to receive such a meaningful gift.

Before we began working, some of us went to see a house down the street where another youth group was working. They were tearing up floors that had been ruined by hurricane Katrina and were only being fixed now, almost 4 years later.

We had the opportunity to do a lot more things today and were really busy painting, measuring, cutting and placing floor planks, as well as continuing to build relationships with the homeowners, neighbors, and the District Superintendents as we work together to achieve a common goal.


The weather was a bit gloomy but after lunch, the sun came out and we were all cheerful to be able to work, no matter how hot and humid it was outside and inside.


Everyone gave their best effort and we are already starting to see the improvements to the house. The primer has already been placed and we finished putting on the second coat! Hopefully we will be able to start using the white paint tomorrow.


The cabinets were ordered and paid for with part of our donations and a large contribution from the cabinet as well. They arrived and we are all excited and extremely motivated to get this done by Friday.

Tomorrow we will have a concert at the Seashore Assembly Center and we invited the homeowners and the neighbors of the houses we are working on to attend. We hope that they will be able to attend so that they can hear God's message through our music but if they can't, we will work on providing a private performance just for them.


We have made a huge improvements and have memorized more than half of our songs by now. We are are trying really hard to prepare for the concert tour that begins on Monday, July 13. The instrumentalists get better with every practice and we the songs are becoming more musical as we continue to wean ourselves away from staring at the music. After supper and rehearsal, we had some family group time where we started to plan for the special progressive dinner we are going to have on Friday. Each family group is going to plan and make a course for the entire group.

Later, we had an evening devotion where we had the pleasure of listening to Tom Dickinson sing "Come Sunday" to start us off. Then Jordan Markwood shared some scriptures with us as well as a song that went along with Psalm 19:14 "May the Words of My Mouth." We ended the night with an affirmation circle where the entire group went around saying the positive things they see in everyone else. It was very touching but also had moments of comic relief so that we wouldn't get too serious.

We can't wait till tomorrow to finish the first house and start setting up the cabinets in the second house.


Until Tomorrow,

David and Jordan, Voices of Youth Blogmasters.