Sunday, August 10, 2008

Mexico Gone for Good




Last week was a Gone for Good (G4G) week at Kaleo. For anyone who doesn't know, roughly once a month instead of our traditional Sunday gathering Kaleo heads out into our community to serve others and show God's love in tangible ways. We've cleaned up an alley in Southwest Bakersfield, painted a dorm at one of the local homeless shelters, thrown a party at a local park and last month we sent out teams of five to six people with $50 and the mandate to prayerfully and creatively go bless people. We called it the Fifty Dollar Experiment, you can read some of the participants experiences here. This month we joined Christ's church of the Valley and went to Mexico for a day and helped build houses for Casa de Amor. (see all the pics here) We had an incredible time I took James and Jason and Becky stayed home with the little ones. 
I was so proud of the boys, Jason helped where he could and kept an eye out for one of the younger kids who came with us, and James worked like a man, really. He stirred cement (by hand) lugged stucco around two hoppers at a time (those things are heavy), applied stucco,  shoveled sand and anything else that needed to be done. All the adults with us were impressed. The down side for him is that my expectations for him are significantly raised. 
I'm hoping to go again in the not too distant future, although I'll probably have to arm wrestle Becky over it since one of us will need to stay home with the youngsters.