Saturday, April 09, 2011

The hills are alive with the sound of chainsaws!


Posted by: Erika and Laura

We began our day with devotions, continuing our study of I John with the second chapter. A nutritious breakfast followed, giving us our strength for the day! The real fun began soon after breakfast, when we left the Long View Ranch for our first service project: cutting and loading logs onto huge camouflaged army trucks, which transported the wood to a storage facility, where they will stay until they are needed to warm people's homes during the winter. There were multiple volunteers from the community slicing fallen trees with chainsaws (Mr. Hood joining them), while the rest of us loaded the logs into trucks. After two hours of loading firewood, we went to the Disciple's Point church in Greeneville, Tennessee, where we were served a delicious barbeque meal. Tomorrow we will be returning to Disciple's Point for a Sunday morning church service. When lunch concluded, we returned to where we had been loading logs before, and continued doing so until around 4 o' clock. All in all, we were able to fill five truckloads with firewood- a new sophomore class record! After we accomplished our mission, we returned to Long View Ranch after a long, hard day of hauling firewood, just in time for dinner. Praise and worship followed our supper of pork, cheese potato casserole, and veggies, with cupcakes for dessert. We had our nightly devotions, during which we gathered in our small groups and reviewed all that we have read and learned over the past two days. Thankfully, we had ideal weather during our working hours, but once we arrived back at Long View, thunder and lightning flooded the sky and torrents of water came gushing down. Part two of manhunt (a rematch) will have to wait until weather permits.
Sophomores signing off!