Jun

Great Canadian Adventure Day 1: Blessing a School and Surveys

I couldn’t just do a simple Facebook update for today: too much has happened! It has been an amazing day of blessing and service here in Medicine Hat, and we have seen willing hearts and hands commit to excellence and be blessed!

The day started out with my mistake: I turned off the ringer on my phone and wound up being tardy with the coffee… wish I could have had that decision back! But that was followed with a morning where I was able to share my testimony and our vision with the team of 35 hardy adventurers who have come to help us out. Can you believe that they came from places as far away as South Carolina, California, Maryland, Ohio, Iowa, Ontario, and Vancouver? Wow. I then explained the survey work they would be doing in the evening. It was interesting having a debate about the merits and disadvantages of allowing the surveyed see the demographic info we were collecting or not.

After a hearty lunch, the team headed over to Cornerstone Christian School. It is a small Christian school on the edge of town, and they have a pretty big grounds. We were able to bless their socks off by taking on a number of projects that seemed to be on the priority list but never at the top, you know how that is. We assigned 8 ladies to reorganize their storage shed and clean it and they made it absolutely immaculate. We had a team of 4 handymen rebuild snow covers for the air conditioners, and 2 more people painted them. We had 3 men on rototilling around the perimeter of the acreage property, and 6 more in shifts mowing the grass and weedeating. We had another 4 people working on digging out a dead cedar shrub, and then planting a new one in its place. And finally, we had 4 men fix up the basketball court – one hoop was ripped off and the other was loose. The teachers kept coming out all afternoon to marvel at all the work we were doing. The principal was thrilled at our progress. We were glad to bring glory to God by acting out John 13:35.

After an afternoon in the hot sun, a lot of the team were pretty beat. A few of the ladies needed to step back and take a rest after supper, but nobody blamed them. We then broke up into teams of 2 and gave out maps for surveying. We got a bit of a late start, at 7pm, but we put in a good 2 hours and the results were staggering. In most metro areas, 1 house in 10 is considered a good response to a survey like this. Some of our teams had as many has 50% responses, and all had well over 20%. But the real gold for us wasn’t in the information being collected – it was in identifying potential core team members who can join us and dream with us about launching a new church in this city. If I am even close, I would say that we identified at least 20 people in 2 hours who were interested in more information about the new church plant! God will build His church, amen?