Week One

Time Spent
Week One- May 27-June 3
Saturday through Saturday 8am -10pm
(one hour break for each breakfast, lunch dinner)
Worked on many random tasks…
-Making signs
-Writing sermons
-Planning worship services
-Shopping, shopping, more shopping for supplies
-Cleaning
-Washing dishes
-Vacuuming
-Traveling to meet with contacts
-Moving boxes
-Decorating Club room
-Moving furniture
-Mixing Paint
-Organizing bunches of stuff
-Inventory to buy $1,600 worth of food and stuff
-LONG shopping trip
-Anything else that needed to be done ☺

Total: 72 hours


Personal Reflection

This week was a struggle because I felt so frustrated with my Site Director. My Area Director and I talked and then we sat down with her and discussed some things. She’s not all that spiritually deep and it’s a struggle when my role is to be the spiritual leader of the youth to have her over me. It’s a weird situation to explain, but I really wanted things to be sorted out in a good way and she never took it that way and spent a lot of time in defensive yelling. So after a night of crying and praying and one hour of sleep I let it all over to God. I’ve never felt so free. He’ll give me strength and I’ll deal with it all in His peace.
I did a lot of random tasks and sometimes several at once. I took my first shopping trip up to Rapid City, which is two hours away, and spent a lot of money on 5 flats filled with groceries. Who knew it could take so much food to fill a site and feed 30ish people three meals a day?! I’m learning a lot about working with large groups. Our first Early Bird week has started where two more staffs of four people each and our Area Director will join us and we’ll all run the site together. Four of them, alumni mostly, will serve as people for us to watch and learn from this week. I still have some of my responsibilities though. I’m excited to get acquainted with the other staff, they are already such a blessing! ☺

Spiritual Reflection

I have been asking God a lot of questions this week. I won’t lie, I’ve definitely looked up avenues home. Plane tickets, car rentals, directions, hotels along the way. And then I stepped back and said WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! I’ve never quit anything, especially something I know that God laid on my heart so strongly. How could I leave this opportunity? Am I leaving because it’s challenging? Who ever said it would be easy? I’m called to a rough path. But he never called me to go alone. How incredible! This is not my journey. I’m His servant. I was thinking, if I were to be working at a factory this summer I would be working for the factory owners so that it would run they way they wanted and never would I begin to call it my factory. Why is it that I continue to think that this journey belongs to me? The only answer I can find…I must continually surrender. A speaker named Terry Bley once said, “A surrendered life equals and empowered life, and an empowered life expects miracles.”