Day 61 - Mission: Staunton Before and After

Since I posted a picture of Kipp earlier, thought I would go ahead and do this one.  When he came to our church as the pastor of worship and outreach, one of the events he created was Mission: Staunton.  The whole idea was instead of gathering the church to do a short-term mission trip overseas, we would just have a short-term mission trip right in our own community.  

During the first Mission: Staunton we actually slept at the church, ate at the church, showered at the YMCA, and worked together on the project.  We spent the evenings at the park (where we had Kids Camp) and then de-briefed at the church before going to bed.  It was very much like being on a short-term mission trip except we spoke the language and the food was safe.  :)

During the first one, we worked on a house where the husband had started a lot of home-improvement projects but never finished.  He had fallen very ill and the house was left unattended to.  We had an entire crew who worked some very long and very hard days to finish out those projects.

It was a really, really difficult and powerful week.  The project had been in motion for months.  Just days before we were to arrive to work, the husband's health took a real turn for the worse.  We asked them if they still wanted us to come - they did.  

The wife had not left her husband's side in weeks.  But she, herself, had a doctor's visit and left for just a couple of hours on the first day we were there.  While she was gone, her husband passed away.

We finished our work over the next 3 days at the family's request.  It was really something.

The second year of Mission: Staunton, there were several work projects that we tackled.  The pictures in this blog are from the house that I worked on.  A sweet little widow lives here all alone - and she is quite elderly.  But healthy and active.  Just not healthy or active enough to tackle painting a house.  :)

Our crew put a new roof on her front porch, we scraped and painted the entire house, removed trees and bushes and lots of poison ivy from around the perimeter of the house and did some minor repairs to the gutters and overhangs.

My main project (in addition to scraping and painting) was to remove the weeds and bushes and a very large tree stump from underneath the tank you see in the picture.  I did not do it all by myself, but I did a very large portion of it.  I love the before and after shots.  :)

I loved how Kipp was a visionary that helped us to see that we don't have to travel out of our town in order to do 'missions.'  God has called us to serve where we are, to bloom where we are planted.