Service!

Lots of different extra serving related opportunities have happened in 2011. I participated in Don't Walk By for the first time. This is an event that happens every Saturday in January in NYC. The goal is to make sure that every homeless person is found and spoken to during the month. I participated on the Saturday that it was in my neighborhood. We split into small groups of about 6 and were assigned blocks to walk in search of any homeless. My group was assigned the area between 59th and 66th from Central Park to Amsterdam. This is a very nice area that includes Lincoln Center and many highrise doorman buildings. It's not super populated with homeless, so we only encountered 3 during our walk. The point is to get these people a hot meal and place to stay for the evening and to direct them to resources for further ongoing help of all kinds. The first two people we spoke to were kind and engaged with us in conversation, but they were not interested in help of any kind and had an attitude of "I've got this. I'm going to be okay on my own". The final man spoke broken english but said he really needed help and told us that he is schizophrenic. He seemed to be waiting for someone and could not leave where he was to go back for the free meal that night. But, he graciously accepted the information we had for safe places he could go to for in depth help. I hope that he was able to make those calls and get to the right people/places.

I'm beginning to help get a children's ministry started for my church's evening service. I had our children's ministry leader, Angela, and another volunteer, Ilyse, over to my apartment one night to discuss the vision for how and when this will get started. Angela brought us a yummy dinner from Whole Foods and we had fun chatting and thinking about and praying for our kiddos. I am currently one of the lead teachers for the morning service but will be transitioning out of that role and into a similar role in the evening. I'm excited to be involved in that capacity at the service I prefer to attend and with the congregation I consider mine. We have 2 families that intend to switch to the evening service and between the 2 families they have 7 kids and one en-route :) So, that will be who we have when we launch in March and we won't require many teachers at first. Both these families are very missional minded and live near our evening service location and the hope is that they will be able to reach families in their neighborhood who will be interested in visiting church. My morning class is booming this year...we've grown from 6 kids to about 15 since the beginning of January!! Even crazier when you think that just 2 years ago I had only 1 or 2 kids in that class each week - wow. Let's hope we see similar growth at our evening service.

I served dinner at Ronald McDonald for the first time in a while. Lasagna was the menu and it was stress.full! After being in the oven for over an hour the lasagna was still completely frozen - something is wrong with their ovens! It all worked out in the end, but I hate that kind of stress. Katie and I were in charge of cooking up mashed potatoes.  I was disappointed it was instant mashed potatoes, but they turned out pretty good.  It was neat to see some of the kids who are still there from the last time I was over there - particularly one girl who had no hair last time I was there and it had grown in quite a bit over the last several months. I really like cooking and serving for these people and need to get back to doing it more regularly.