Grace Fellowship Church

We made it to West Virginia, had our orientation meeting, and got settled into our rooms. We are looking forward to church tomorrow and a great week of service ahead!

Due to the rain that came through this morning, outside church had to become parking lot church at Clendenin UMC. Despite the changes that need to be made in this COVID-19 season, our host church family welcomed us with kind words and car horn honks in celebration of their first mission team this season. 

We took some time this afternoon to hang out at Coonskin Park to get to know each other better and talk about the importance of our stories. We split into small groups and shared our testimonies. We got done just in time to beat the rain out of the park. Ready for a relaxing time as a team tonight before our hard work starts tomorrow.

We did our morning Pelican guide devo this morning over breakfast. It was a great time diving into the life of Jesus over breakfast. Gonna be a great day!

We spent our day cleaning out a house in Charleston that is being donated to a local ministry by a member of our host church. It was a stinky, messy job, but such a privilege to see something dirty become clean and ready to be made beautiful and usable by God. Just like Jesus does for us.

Today we started out removing the flooring in the Charleston house. We found beautiful original hardwood underneath!

The deck entrance to the garage apartment came down in order to be safe and help secure the building now that it is cleaned out. 

Despite the fact that a small circle of tile stubbornly held to the floor, it felt good to get the apartment completely cleared out and ready to be remodeled.

It was great to have pastor Don working alongside us this week! He has a huge heart for missions and he loves to hang out with PPM teams whenever we're in town! 

The last time our team was in Clendenin, we got to be one of the first groups to work on the Dock, an old church that was given to Praying Pelican Missions as a hub of ministry in central West Virginia. Today we got to clean, organize, inventory and prepare the tools and supplies stored there to make things easier for their staff and future teams to find and use.

We were able to build shelves in the storage room in order to organize well. Our PPM staff was so excited to have the room looking so good!

We had some time after wrapping up work on the Dock to take a walk and pick up trash. We even got to meet the mayor of Clendenin and the town deputy, as well as a couple of kids who offered to let Brent use their fishing poles :) 

The first stop on our rec day was the New River Gorge Bridge. The gift shop and museum were closed due to COVID-19, but we were still able to walk down to the overlook and take in the view.