Rob – I went to High School with Rob. He lived a few doors down the street from the
church on Pixley Road. He attended our
youth fellowship here with me when I was a student at GCHS. Like many of you young people, God became
real to me and to Rob through youth ministry.
We lost track of each other after High School, but several years ago I
reconnected with Rob at FCWC. This year
he and a buddy of his were gofors for another group of sites that didn’t
include ours. On Wednesday we ran into a
problem with the electrical system. He
happened to show up on our site just to pay us a visit and in one of my better
decisions of the week, I asked for his help (instead of saying that I could
figure it out) in resolving the problem.
He not only dove right in, he reached the limits of his expertise and
needed to call in an even bigger expert to trace down the electrical
problem. You see, the electrical wiring
in these old homes is pretty poor. There
are no ground wires, and the manner in which things were wired together was not
up to the electrical codes we have today.
His expert found the problem and the next morning he went over to our
site and installed a new ceiling light that we didn’t planned on and a new electrical
outlet to replace a very unsafe one.
Best of all, I deepened my connection with him, met his wife and HS
sweetheart and made a commitment to keep in closer touch with him.
Savannah – Sometimes we give special attention to the juniors
and seniors on our sites, and we make some of them “student shepherds”. The student that I was most impressed with
was Savannah, a homeschooled 8th grader who lives in Pittsford and
worships with people in Chili. This girl
was so willing to help in whatever way we asked her, she didn’t waste time
socializing too much, and she was curious about everything. At the end of one of the days at our site,
she came upstairs to where I was discussing the electrical wiring problems we
were having and how we were going to sort them out. I thought she might be stopping up to urge me
to leave because everyone else was ready to go.
Instead, she told me that she wanted to understand more about the electrical
problems we were having and how we were going to solve them. At the end of the last day, she was there to
help me reinstall the blinds that two of my other students repeatedly failed to
properly install. I told Savanah and I
wrote to her and told her that she was going to become someone special in this
world because she applied herself to whatever task she took on at camp.
Tyreese and Marcus – These boys lived at the house we worked
on with their grandmother. I think I met
Marcus’s father once when I was there but essentially their dads were absent the
three days we were there, and sadly they are probably absent most of the time. We had planned to paint their bedrooms with a
basic off-white paint, but one of ours site leaders, Scott, asked them what
color paint they wanted, checked it with their grandmother, and went out and
bought the paint for the rooms. Then our
students worked along with each of these boys to paint their rooms, and in the
process of working with them, I got to know them. Yes, they lacked some discipline, and they
lacked some confidence in taking on some of the repairs but they were willing
to learn and to work. They showed pride
in some of the things they had done. One
had built a stool at Boy Scouts. The
other ran 5K’s and showed me some of his medals. So although these boys lacked the good parenting
that most us have, they showed a willingness to learn and took pride in their
work. We gave them buttons and shirts to
make them “official” and they certainly felt included by our students which was
such a blessing to them.
So, yes, some work was done on 53 homes this past week, but
the best work of all was the work that God in us through the relationships that
were either formed or rekindled at FCWC.
That’s what FCWC, that’s what Christianity, is all about. It’s about the relationship between us and God
and about the relationships between all of us who receive Christ.
