"It's a beautiful day in the Bahamas" we hear again at 7am. Up and at 'em it's time to get the day started. Day four of VBS started with the kids taking a walk to round up the neighborhood children and encourage them to come. (below)
Now I'm not sure about anyone else, but this was a beautiful sight in my eyes. Here we have several youth on there summer break, up at 8am walking the streets encouraging kids and peers to come to VBS so that they can share the Good news of Jesus Christ. Absolutely Awesome.
Before we kicked of the morning ceremonies, a few of us went for a quick walk around a portion of the neighborhood. Michelle took us by the flop house that they had been gutting out for the past couple days.
This house has been ransacked by druggies and squatters. This is an elderly ladies home that was NOT abandoned, she just wasn't home for a while due to a hospital stay i believe.
Whatever the case, people basically broke into her home while she was away and destroyed the place.
One of the missions for the group was to clean out the house and board it up to try and prevent further damage.
(Above) this room looked just like the other rooms above before we started to clean it out. It's not perfect by any stretch, but it's a sight better than what it was.
This was all of the stuff that was removed form the few rooms they had done so far. Literally entire walls were pulled out of this house because they had been kicked over by the squatters.
On the way back to the church Michelle noticed this banana tree. The bananas were not ripe, but I still figured I'd try one...........
That's me trying to rinse the nasty taste of an unripened banana from my mouth. Yuck! It tasted much like a very bitter cucumber, not good.
When we returned registration was in full swing. The kids had done a great job getting the neighborhood kids to come join us.
Noah making sure his new friend gets registered.
Some were a bit more zealous at 9am than the rest of us :-)
After registration and opening ceremonies we went right to our three sessions, Bible study, arts and crafts and games.
The kids are really taking well to the Bible lessons. They are interested in hearing the stories that the teachers are telling and Michelle keeps them interested with new interpretive movements for the verses that they are learning.
Arts and crafts was BUSY today, with an ambitious schedule of hand painting, necklace making and dancing, they had their work cut out for them.
After hand painting there was quite a bit of clean up.
All the kids were big fans of the necklaces they were making
Today for games they played soccer and kickball
Ray was schooling the kids on some soccer moves.
He's Brazilian, what do you expect. lol.
High fives all around for good plays!
This was how our drinking water was brought to us each day. We went through a LOT of water.
Bethany was making new friends
For some reason Seth enjoys tickling the kids until they nearly wet themselves.
Adrienne and Michell found a local neighbors house to sit and chat.
Seth putting mosquito repellent on one of the kids.
Me and Adrienne making silly faces with this cute little guy.
After VBS we of course had our construction projects. I was unable to get pictures of the construction because I was in a bathroom all afternoon laying tile with Seth, Adrienne and Collin. We are almost finished and tomorrow I will be taking a break from that so that I can go around and get pictures of other projects.
At the end of the day we gathered in our area for a great praise and worship session. Howie and the band are awesome and State Line Youth did a wonderful interpretive movement.
The preaching is absolutely fantastic and challenging. In tonight's message Ken was really in our face honest with a message that challenged us to consider where we were in our lives with respects to doing our part of the great commission. God will do his part, but He (God) says for us to GO! and he will be there with us. Not for us to wait on Him to give us the strength, money, nerve or whatever and then we go. No! We GO first and be confident in knowing that He will be their for us as He said he would.
Jimmy found a cool new hat
And Grahm thought his mom looked so beautiful in the hat that he had to give her a kiss.
Today was fantastic. We had a great day of VBS, several construction projects are nearly complete or complete and during the evangelism walks so far we have had 5 people make a decision to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. And that's just the ones that decided to do it right then and there in front of us. There's no telling how many more have or will make decisions because of the message we are spreading here. In my opinion, if only one person was saved due to our presence then the trip was worth it. But we have FIVE so far. PRAISE GOD. All we have to do is tell people about God and His Son Jesus and then the rest is up to the Holy Spirit and God.
Tomorrow is our last day of VBS and our block party for the neighborhood. Please pray that we have great attendance and good weather. We have been having rain in the afternoons and that would seriously hinder the block party.
Until next time, God bless you.
JM
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