NC Day #6 - 7.13.18

Our last full day here in North Carolina! We woke up early and had breakfast, but no morning worship today. Instead, we gathered with the other groups that are staying here with us and prayed for the clients who's houses we are working on, the staff here at ReCreation, and each of our respective teams. After our prayer, we headed to the work site and got after it! The team worked hard to finish up the projects that we had; digging the septic trenches and painting the house. Upon arrival we discovered that there had been some rain in the night and a few brave souls went into the our second, unfinished trench and bailed out the standing water so that we could get back to digging and leveling in preparation for the second line of piping to be laid. Because of the delay at the start the trench took longer than expected, but there was no discouragement from our team as they stepped up and worked hard for most of the morning and into the afternoon. Finally, after we had gotten the trench to the correct specifications, we began to lay in the piping.  Once that was set in place, we buried the pipes and leveled out the yard so that the homeowner can reseed the yard. The house was ready upon our arrival for a second coat of paint and the team divided and conquered to finish up all of the painting of the final coats before the work day was even officially finished! We cleaned up once everything was done and said our goodbyes to Ms. Sharon and her grandkids who we have gotten to know this past week. We headed back to ReCreation for some well earned free time before dinner. After dinner we joined together with the other groups here and all of the staff to worship together one last time. George encouraged us to not just enjoy serving this week, but to take the energy and servant hearts that we have seen on display this week back home with us. After this ReCreation end of the week worship time, our team convened for our final porch time. Rather than meet in the gym at ReCreation as we had all week, we met outside around a small fire so that we could admire God’s creation as we continued to worship Him. There was no ‘remember that time’ or ‘I saw Jesus’ tonight, we started straight in with continued worship, which was followed by Luke giving the final talk of the trip. Luke spoke about Abraham, who we had studied in our pre-trip training and we reviewed all that we had learned and how it applied to the week we had just had. Throughout our time studying Abraham we have seen him continue to build altars throughout his experiences: altars of appearance, calling, repentance, and assurance.  Luke used these as a guide for how we can structure our lives to be open to the leading of Jesus in Williamsburg like we have been here in North Carolina.  Then we looked at one final altar moment in Genesis 15 where God establishes a covenant with Abraham.  So we created a final altar of covenant moment for our team where we could put behind the things that are holding us back from fully committing to Jesus.  It was great to see our team take this moment of honesty to establish their own commitments with Jesus.  Finally, we closed our evening together in small groups as a team to discuss final commitments and realizations as we head back home. We will be leaving in the morning after breakfast and cleaning/packing up. If you aren't already, please sign up for our text list "NCPARENT" to 41411 to receive updates as we travel home!