Goodbye MDS Pass Christian

Well, my time here at MDS is coming to an end. It's sad. Just like last week, as soon as I start to get to know my fellow volunteers, it's time to leave. I had a great time here, and love my new buddies, Lori, Brett, and Maureen.

Here's this week's group. I have a beard...
Wish me luck on my long journey home. I'll be stopping in Pensacola for today, then making the long haul to DC tomorrow.

More Prayer Requests

It was a tough day for some of the folks from Regina. Brendan's 2 year old daughter, Keily, who's still at home in Canada, was just hospitalized for spinal meningitis today and is on life support. Brendan is flying back and will be with his family tonight. Please say a prayer for Brendan, his daughter, and the rest of his family.

Before we learned about Brendan's daughter we had a nice picnic at the park. My buddies Lori and Brett and I acted like degenerates.
We also had a race up the slide and climbed around this crazy modern jungle gym. The kids these days have some awesome playground stuff, including a mini rock climbing wall. However, one huge omission from the playground - the monkey bars.

Sidenote: Brett, the Nebraska farm boy did NOT fit in the kiddie playhouse.

On the job I did lots more drywalling. My hand hurts. Hopefully we'll finish up tomorrow.

My Puppy

My parents told me today that my puppy Quinn has a tumor on his spine and that he's partially paralyzed. He doesn't have much time left. If you're a praying person, please say a prayer for my puppy Quinn and also for my parents who love him very dearly.

In less important news, I got to go to the beach yesterday.
I saw a turtle in the MDS parking lot.
And I did lots of drywalling with Canadians. The Canadian invasion of MDS has us Americans outnumbered 19 to 3. They seem like pretty nice folks though, so it should be a good week.

Day 5: Rain, Mud, and Spiderman

Yesterday was the last day for most of the short-termers who were only at Pass Christian for a week. Fortunately for me, the Univest group decided to leave mid-day so they could get back home at a decent hour. That means only a half day of work for Jared!

Unfortunately most of the half workday was spent out in the rain and mud... Here's a shot of me hiding from the torrential downpour under the DeDeaux house.
Here are the short-termers for the week. Take note of the nasty beard on the guy on the left.
And a shout out to the long-term volunteers. These guys are awesome and wonderfully patient with us unskilled folk.The three youngins in the middle of that picture went with me to see Spiderman 3 last night. I enjoyed it. It had good thematics and good action, even if it seemed a bit slow in the middle. I think the story was just as good, if not better than the other movies, but just not executed well. The dialogue was a bit weak at times too.

Of course the whole sequence with the evil Peter Parker - only God knows what they were thinkin when they made that. During the jazz club scen, I commented to my neighbor that Spiderman had jumped the shark...

Fortunately, the ending made up for that evil Peter Parker garbage, in my opinion.

The one thing that kinda bugged me about the movie was that Venom went to God to ask for help, and even though his motives were wrong, he died without understanding why his lust for power and revenge was wrong. I felt like killing Venom was a Hollywoodification to satisfy the bloodlust of the audience. This is ironic because it's completely contradictory to the theme of the rest of the movie.

So go see Spiderman. I'm excited for 28 Weeks Later which comes out next week.

Day 4: Chugging Milk and God-talk

This is Borg.

Borg has an inhuman capacity for eating food and enjoys pushing his talents to the limit. Yes, I know he only appears to weigh about 140 lbs, but I'm guessing that about 40 of those pounds are attributed to the parasites living in his digestive system, seeing as how he ate 8 hotdogs plus sides and smores on Wednesday night.

What you see in the picture is Borg attempting to chug an entire gallon of milk at once. He's standing outside because he's aware of the negative consequences which are inevitable, even if he succeeds in his task. Borg drank about 85% of the gallon within 2 minutes, and let's just say that the other pictures of Borg are not as pretty. Despite Borg's own disappointment that he couldn't finish the gallon-o-milk challenge, we're all very proud of him. As a sidenote, he did all this a half hour after eating a massive meal of food.

On a more serious note, I'd have to say that up through Thursday I was a little disappointed that besides the allotted times for prayer and worship, there was not a whole lot of God-talk. We had tons of fun all week, but I didn't get to do much of my favorite thing in this world: talk about life and God. Fortunately, this changed late-night on Thursday.

I was very fortunate to be able to share my testimony and to hear the scary and amazing testimony of one of the other volunteers. About 5 of us stayed up late and just shared our thoughts on God. We asked some tough questions about the trials of life and why they occur, and it was wonderful to hear everyone's perspective.

The most important thing that I pulled out of the evening, personally, was to be able to refocus on why I'm doing what I'm doing. It's so easy to get caught up in trying to learn this new job, and trying to perform well, and being social to make new friends and love my fellow man. I also worry about posting interesting things to the blog to try to impact people's lives who aren't able to be here with me. All these things are great, but I need to remember that I'm here for God, and no matter the quality of my work, or how witty or interesting I am, or how creative I am with the blog, all that really matters is that I'm serving the Lord. If I serve God, He will lead me where he wants me to be, even if the world does not see my work as a material success. Much thanks, especially to my fellow worker who shared his testimony, because it's helped to lead me forward on a Godly path.

Day 4: More Roofing

I apologize to those who hoped for a daily update yesterday. I decided to keep the laptop away for the night and be social with my new friends. It was a great decision. We had a bonfire with hotdogs and smores and some Bible study/bonding time. I got to chat with the long-term volunteers and the other short-termer that will be here with me next week. Hopefully we'll get to do something fun over the weekend. The 15 folks from Univest leave tomorrow, so I'm sad to see them go. They're extremely entertaining - a very fun group.

So today we almost finished the roofing. We needed, like, 2 more shingles... Here's another shot of David DeDeaux's house that I've been roofing.
Mr. DeDeaux has 14 children and 96 total grandchildren, including great grandchildren. We confirmed this number with his son, and it's totally ridiculous. I have to say that working at the DeDeaux house is fantastic because they always bring out tasty treats. Today it was delicious iced tea and strawberry ice cream. Here's a few of the DeDeaux kids with one of my fellow volunteers, John.
Rumor has it that tomorrow I get to move massive pieces of drywall. I'm told it's going to be an extremely painful experience. On the plus side, I'm wearing a superman t-shirt.

On our way to the job site yesterday, we saw someone assembling their pre-built house. It's delivered on a trailer in two pieces. They're putting the two pieces together with a crane. You can't quite tell in the picture, but it's not on the ground - it's hanging in the air.And for the shot of the day, here's the mightiest portable basketball hoop on earth. Home destroyed, hoop still standing.

Day 2: Roofing

I told everyone on my post yesterday that I'd be doing some drywall. This was true, and drywalling was interesting for about an hour, but they quickly pulled me to do some roofing. So most of my day was spent on the roof of this house:
We shingled half the roof. We'll probably finish it tomorrow. I have to say that after two days I still love manual labor. It was hot, but I love the heat. I hope I'll get to do this kind of stuff when I go down to Peru.

Here's a shot from the roof of the remains of the house across the street. Just a concrete porch.
There's a huge group of people from a bank called Univest in Souderton, PA here. They're company was originally founded by Mennonites and they send they're employees down here on trips every year. They even pay them while they're down here. I had no idea such awesome companies existed... So instead of posting lots of stuff like last night, I'm going to try to be social with the Univest and MDS people.

And by the way, thanks for all the comments! I feel so loved!