The Chicago crew is closing out their week finishing projects and cleaning up the site. Meanwhile, a block party is going on outside orchestrated by Rock Church as a wonderful community outreach event. There are giant inflatables, carnival games, food, music, face painting (courtesty of more Blitz Build volunteers), and excited families everywhere. It a fitting picture to close the week for this team as this community will reap the benefits of their labor for years to come.
Read on to get some of Gary Fisher's (project manager for the Chicago site) final thoughts.
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Though several "only God" moments have occurred this week, perhaps the one that comes to the front happened on Wednesday. We had about a group of about fifteen daily leaders and "every day" volunteers that were on site to serve again. We got organized, prayed in, and went to work. We had too much site clean up to accomplish after a big day of landscape the previous day, and "out of the blue", a group of about 15 high school kids from a suburban church showed up and asked if they could stay and help! Could they help??? We dug in hard and accomplished all of our goals by lunch time.
Lunch was late (unexpected circumstance out of our control), so we gathered, grabbed "hold you over" snacks, and flipped our devotional slot to before lunch, hoping it would show soon. A another group of about 15 large scale donors for the project were slated to join us AFTER we ate lunch and went back to work, so there would be enough room for them to eat and get plugged in to task. They came in right in the middle of our devotional, and, "just coincidentally", the rental company had sent an extra table and we had stacked some extra chairs in another corner of our break room for "what ifs"......we then knew why we had done that! Now as a large group of about 55, they engaged in our devotional, lunch arrived "coincidentally" right after we finished our devotional. We all broke bread TOGETHER now, then I was prompted to point out to the group that here, all together, was a perfect representation of the richness and fullness of the Body, as the young, energetic shouldered with the older business owners led by the experienced, committed leaders for an afternoon of a wide range of task completion. It was a beautiful mosaic of God's intention for the body, and we prayed together before going to work that afternoon led by the passionate pastor of Rock Church, Pastor Washington, hammering home our little God-orchestrated "slice of heaven" here on earth!! Praise God from Whom ALL blessings flow!!
In His love and service, by His grace, Gary
