past, present, future

Past: This past weekend, I was blessed beyond measure to be back in the bay! There are not words for how much I love everyone there, & for how good it was to be back, even for just a few days. Special thanks to Say-rah Denton, for letting me putz around with her in the tool crib. I needed a fix of my home-away-from-home, bad. Only sad part--too cold to sleep in the hammock. ;P It was especially great to see all the things that have changed, and all the things that have stayed the same, if that makes sense. It was good in a weird way to be able to see Lagniappe & the bay with new eyes. One of my very favorite parts was watching the sky as the plane took off when I flew back to VA. The sun was just setting and there was a brilliant orange glow as far as I could see. So cool.

Present: Today, being Saturday, I volunteered half the day with Housing Partnerships, Inc. It's a local organization that uses mostly volunteer (& some subcontracted) labor to do home repairs and rebuilds in the Williamsburg, James City County, & York County area. Some of the homes, like those in the bay, are still being rebuilt after a hurricane (Isabel, in 2003)... others are just straight out of the last centuries, with no heat, or no indoor plumbing. Our volunteer coordinator, Brandie, was telling us of a home worked on last fall in which the husband and wife were each handicapped... the only bathroom was an outhouse... they would roll their wheelchair to the back door, lower themselves into another wheelchair, and then repeat the process to return indoors. HPI used volunteer labor to not only build the couple a handicap ramp, but also to provide them with an indoor bathroom. Anyways, today, we worked out by Norge re-roofing a house for a family whose roof had begun leaking... hopefully it should be done by next weekend. I'm way excited to be able to reach out to local families in this way... it can be all too easy to get sucked into the "Lagniappe bubble" & forget that other people in other places have been through hurricanes, too, and are in need of having their homes repaired/rebuilt, also.

Future: Speaking of.... sort of... guess what? Next weekend, we're going to get to work part of the day with a church team from Lynchburg, who has experience roofing from when they went down to--get this--Biloxi a few months ago. How cool is that?!? I can't wait to get to work with them! I feel like I'm going to be meeting part of my long-lost family, or something. :P

God is everywhere, & in all things.