May 30 - June 1

That next Sunday, the last of May, I had nothing big to do in Church. I worshiped during one service and I helped out with Rainbow club again. This time I helped the teacher a little more but all I really did was try and help keep the kids quite and orderly. It was nice just to sit back and enjoy a service.

Monday night we hosted an event called The Gathering Inn. The program of the Gathering Inn is all about helping the poor. It targets those people who have lost their home for whatever reason. The staff of Gathering Inn have all of the participants in the program take drug and alcohol tests daily and only allow the participants to be in the program for 180 days to assure that the people in the program cannot just rely on free handouts but have to pursue employment (if they lost their jobs, not all of them have) and other living arraignments. Then they take all the participants (there was about 40-50 that night) to a church where they are fed dinner and allowed to sleep the night. The staff of the Gathering Inn once again has things set up to ensure that participants just don't take advantage of generous people and have a list of rules that they read each night at the church; things like what areas are off limits, who the monitors for the night are, where the fire exits are, and rules of behavior like no romantic relations during the night. They also have the participants clean up after themselves and ask for volunteers to clean every area they are allowed to be in. Its a great program. This was the first time Granite Springs Church would be hosting it and Pastors Kevin and Doug wanted me to shadow the person in charge of our end of the event and report back to them about how things went. I was impressed with the whole thing. There were no problems and I was surprised to see that almost every single one of the people who came volunteered to do something. They were truly thankful to be there. For dinner we had Tri-Tip (the 4th time for me in 8 days) which everyone was excited about and then we had a special treat for them. We had asked a local band to come and play for them. The group consisted of a drum player, a bass player, and a lead guitar and vocalist who called themselves the Wasted Youth (did I mention all of them had graying hair?). They absolutely loved it. They were singing along and clapping and the band was having a good time too. I was so glad to be a part of it, even though all I really did was help set up some chairs. The only hiccup we encountered was when they were explaining how things went to us about 15 minutes before our guests arrived and told us that the pastor have 10 minutes or so of time to share some words of hope (read mini sermon).

Pastor Kevin and I were a little surprised. What Kevin decided on was to talk about the picture of the prodigal son and have me tell some of my story as an encouragement to our guests to tell their stories to us. For Kevin he had practiced and presented that picture so many times he knew almost exactly what he was going to say but I... I didn't know how my story could possibly qualify as words of hope to a group of people who had seen so much misfortune. I went off and prayed about it till they came. I honestly didn't know what exactly I was going to say until the Pastor Kevin was partway through his speech. I realized that these people saw themselves mostly as prodigal children while I had been the opposite and that the story of how God had been turning my life from one of following the rules and holding on to resentful and prideful feelings (like the elder son) to a person more like him might offer them some hope on their journey. I was relieved when people shook my hand afterwords both that it was over and that it touched some of them. Maybe God can produce living water from out of the rock of my life.