Day 6 - A Little Gift of Sunshine

It blows my mind a little bit that tomorrow is Friday and our week is coming to a close. It's been an awesome ride and Christ has been evident in our mission work every step of the way!! He is so good to us!

The Perdue/Walker group (we haven't found a solid combo name for their group yet!) went to a church called the North End Village and got back to basics with some good ole manual labor. The yard of the church needed a face lift and got just that. Thankfully, we had cloud coverage all day and so our kids didn't get too hot while they were weeding and mulching! Margaret Walker told me that the amount of work they got done made huge progress on the overall upkeep of the church, which will only improve it's impact on the community around it!

At another site, the McSims crew prepped Central Union Missions for their huge, moving-out garage sale! While they didn't get to work the actual sale, they did get to hear the hearts behind the mission group and see how sold out for the Gospel their staff is. Central Union would have had a much harder time trying to relocate without the help of our 86:12ers. Stepping back a day, Whitney Bras recounted a story where she and Anderson Resler were at Wider Circle--the furniture warehouse. She said that they had a conversation about the Gospel with a Jewish girl. The Lord moves in cool ways and encourages boldness when fear tries to set in.

I've discovered that God has a funny sense of humor. Today, as everyone was heading to the World War II Memorial for our final DC concert, it starts raining on us and was expected to continue until the wee hours of the morning. Yet at 5:30, when we started our concert, the clouds had broken and I traded my rain jacket for my sunglasses. Either weather in this city is weird or God was sending a message. Or both. We also got a visit from our congressman, Kenny Marchant! We had a lot of students asking him questions and it was pretty awesome that he came out to support us! The concert was great and we took some sweet group pictures.

Back to our campus later that night, the meeting was starting later than we anticipated, so everyone was just hanging out in front of the cafeteria. One of our seniors, Joe Han, grabbed a guitar and led an impromptu 30 minute worship session. I'm continually blown away by these students and their hearts for the Lord!!! At the meeting, we played a few rounds of "never have I ever..." of which Nicholas Boyd won both rounds. You've just gotta love those 6th grade boys. Rich and John gave us a quick word of encouragement for the night and everyone headed back to the dorms.

It's bittersweet to know that tomorrow is our last day of mission work. It's been an unreal week of seeing why we came to DC in the first place and how God has moved in our students' hearts and through their hands and feet! Continued prayer to finish tomorrow strong and know the higher purpose behind our actions!