Habitat for Humanity

Saturday was our church's Serve Day.  There were various organized activities to volunteer to help serve our community that day. J and I signed up for Habitat for Humanity.  I have always wanted to get involved in Habitat, and knew J would be a great asset to any group with all his experience rehabbing and building houses.  The problem was time.  The church group volunteers on Saturdays and that is my Ann Taylor day.  But I asked off for Serve day and J and I signed up to help.  I loved our youth mission trips when I was in high school so I thought I would enjoy Habitat, and I did!

However, I was not prepared for mud.  It has been raining constantly here, and I just assumed that we would be inside working on the house.  That was not the case.  The house our group was assigned to had basically just been started and the roof literally put on the day before (in the pouring down rain).  We were going to building the front porch.  Not a problem for me, since it seems every mission trip before involved me building a porch!  I must be an expert by now, right?  We wore old clothes, and layers, just like the info packet said to. However, I did not prepare for mud. I am not just talking about a little dirty yard. I mean the entire yard was mud.  The kind of mud that if you did not keep moving your feet, you'd lose your shoes from being stuck.  My poor feet were wet from the start.  I just hadn't planned on worrying about my knee doing habitat, but I had to worry about slipping and falling.

J was amazing. It is so nice to see him in an element he is just naturally good at.  I don't think we would have gotten as far as we did with out him.  Our group leader would have had to do all the measuring and cutting on everything, but trusted jay to measure and mark the support beams and go to town with out hovering around.  I was good at holding and retrieving tools from the trailer.  I also got to start all the nails for J to nail 2 2X4s together.  J was not impressed with my hammering ability.  He said he'd never seen anyone sit down to hammer.  I thought I was cute.....  I did much better with the joyce nails to hold in the support brackets.  A kept thinking to myself...I hope Jesus was a better carpenter than I am.  We had a great day together and hopefully we can volunteer again.