MISSION COMPLETE!!! This year instead of traveling hundreds of miles to teach and show the youth how to serve we decided to stay in Lafayette and serve in our own community. I’ll be honest, a few weeks before our mission it looked like I was going to have to cancel it-I had 2 kids signed up, lots of “maybe’s” from the majority of the rest of the group, and worst of all, we didn’t have any feasible projects to work on! What’s a mission trip without a mission? Well of course God is good……kids showed up, we got 3 project requests, folks signed up to help feed us….things were looking great!! Then I saw the weather report-thunderstorms for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Seriously??? We needed a break! Well of course, God is good….we painted a mom’s entire house our first day-no rain-and got to celebrate by going to Happy Hollow pool that night to cool off. Day two, we transformed flower beds for Stephanie Brennan’s mom and grandma, then we headed over to help Zach and Steph get caught up with their yard work as well-no rain-just crazy hot-and we got to celebrate by jumping into their neighbor’s pool with all our clothes on(with permission of course)! That evening we painted the Wellner-mobile, keep an eye out for it, it’s hilarious. Our last day we started off the morning handing out freezy pops to construction workers around town before heading over to the house we were working on to touch up the paint we had accidentally gotten on the ceiling. We also ripped out the entire front flower bed that wasn’t so much a flower bed anymore as much as a weed bed, and replace the weeds with new landscaping-as soon as we had the last tool in the car, saying our goodbyes, what should happen? RAIN!!!!!! God is so good, he gave us so much this week-wonderful people that fed us 3 delicious meals a day, perfect weather, wonderful friends that came and helped me stay sane as I spent 4 1/2 days with teenagers hopped up on blow pops, cheetos, and 44oz slurpies, sweet moments of worship and insight into God’s desire to be in us and work through us,Emily Umulis who came and shared her story as we broke her in, (it was her first time ever going to youth group, we hope she’ll join us again!), the list could go on and on about God’s provision for this week. My prayer is that in all that provision that the kids saw God’s heart for them and for our mission-that they can be transformed through service, and that they’ll continue to serve after today.