Last Mission Indy Week

Whew! The last week of Mission Indy...again...where to begin???

This fourth week was at Englewood Christian Church on the near east side of Indianapolis. We interns actually stayed at the mission house next door instead of at the church with the groups. This was the same place that we had stayed during our first week in Indy. It was pretty awesome to get to finish where we started. You know us English majors...we like it when things come back full circle. Gives us a sense of security and completion. I guess the non-postmodern ones like that anyway...haha. Okay, enough about English.

We had groups during this week from Knoxville, TN, Florissant, MO, Clinton, IN, and one other city in Indiana that I can't remember...oops. I can remember the group just not their town. Anyway, I was with First United Methodist Church from Clinton, IN. They were great. We worked on a member of Englewood's home just a few blocks from the church. This had been a previous Mission Indy house, but had not gotten finished the year before. We arrived thinking that we really only had to do some touch ups on soffit and then the back of the house, but soon realized that the group from last year had some how neglected to prime anything which meant that all the paint was peeling off. Ahh!!! What a nightmare! We had to rescrape, reprime, and repaint over the whole house! We had intended to only be there for 2 days and then move onto a different project, but we ended up staying the whole week and still having more to be done. Lesson learned. Preparation is 70% of painting. Even though it is a pain, I would much rather do it than come back a year later only to find that it all needs to be rescraped and repainted.

One blessing of the week was that the leader of the youth group, Ed, had a great deal of carpentry experience. He was able to do far more on the house than we ever thought possible. He replaced an entire wall from the inside to the out including putting up new siding on the north side of the house. He also replaced boards on the bottom of the east side of the house which were completely rotted. This was a great help to Ron who otherwise would have had to do that himself.

The week was great. The kids were great workers most of the time...haha...and it was a delight to get to work along side them and get to hear what they were learning. I also got to spend a lot of time with the 4 year old neighbor Ben. So precious! He rode on my shoulders and helped me facilitate the worksite. :)

God worked in huge ways throughout the summer. So many, that I am totally unaware of as well. He had things prepared for use before we even knew that we needed them. My next blog will be about some of the major things that God taught me throughout the summer. The challenge will definitely be making it short enought that people will actually read it! haha.