Pelican Serve Week

To start Pelican Serve Week off, I served with a local school to get everything ready for their Fall Festival. It was a wonderful outreach for the community as well as a fundraiser for the senior class. 

Tonight I got to serve with Northminster Presbyterian Church in Tucson for their Greet and Treat event. We started by filling 1000 bags of popcorn!

On Saturday we got to serve the children from our community at Willow Creek Community Church at the annual Trunk or Treat. We had hundreds of cars decorated and more kids in costumes than I could count. Lots of fun and creativity. 

Privileged to serve lunch again this year at the Denver Rescue Mission during Pelican Serve Week. I'm not required to wear a hair net (for obvious reasons), but they do require that I wear a beard net - always a good time... 

Today for Pelican serve week, we are helping Pastora Susana, whose house, unfortunately, was burned in a fire accident. We are now helping to clean up so they can start scraping cleaning and painting the walls and repairing the electrical work. It will take time to rebuild, but we know God is in control and as servants of Christ we want to be there for our Pastora Susana and be the hands and feet of Jesus. 

The nursing room in our church nursery was really needing a new look!  I was able to start that process with a new coat of paint today!

This morning we went door to door with RVA Hope, a non-profit that ministers to different neighborhoods in Richmond, VA. It was great to see the consistent relationships built in the community here as we checked in on people, offered hot sandwiches, and prayed over them. There is so much brokeness and suffering in this area and we were able to be beacons of truth and hope as we loved on people. 

One lady we visited named Felicia was a missionary herself in India when she was younger and shared stories with us and offered up an encouraging message to us in the process. Iron sharpening iron! 

We started off our day serving in our own place! We have an office and we wanted to paint and make it beautiful! 

Here is the before! We can wait to show you how it ends! 

We’ve spent the past two afternoons handing out car packages to pastors all over the Tulsa Metro area. We’ve even had our 4 year old Sophia out helping after school. It’s such a blessing to stop by and pray with pastors in our community.

This is looking great! We put in hard and teamwork, but above all, Love! 

We love our office. It was beautiful before, but it is more beautiful now! All colors match, and it looks fantastic! 

We can't wait for everyone to see it! 

This afternoon I got the opportunity to help our missions department by hanging photos in our foyer to help celebrate serve day that many of our congregation participated in this past Saturday. I loved being able to serve and encourage my own church this week. 

The Minneapolis staff, and a few staff who flew in for meetings, served at Every Meal this afternoon. 

Every Meal was birthed out of a need noticed by a Minneapolis local church. The members noticed that children in the schools were hoarding lunch food because they were not sure they would have food at home. So members in the church began sending backpacks filled with food home with the children on the weekends. Now, the non-profit serves over 500 schools in the area. 

We packed 1,956 bags of food!

Since Bree and I live close enough to go serve together, we volunteered at the food Bank in New Braunfels today! It was a long but fun day working two shifts in two different areas-the kitchen and the pantry. 

I volunteered at my kids' school as a watchdog. The "watchdogs" program (dogs stands for dads of great students) is an initiative that some parents put together after the Uvalde school shooting. It allows parents to sign up to be present at the school. Once there you patrol the parking lot, the hallways, making sure exit doors are locked, volunteer with your kids teachers to read to the kids and assist with assignments, patrol during recess, and help with dismissal. Some kids thought I was a secret agent and asked where my HQ was 🙂. 

We were at "Tabernáculo Cristiano" church today helping with the cleaning of the land and moving 160 blocks for them to keep building

We are excited and ready to serve today in our community.  We are delivering meals to the elderly with Meals On Wheels.  

Cannot wait to spend some time checking in and praying for these sweet folks that are so appreciative to receive a hot meal.

Serving today at Progress Academy School Fundraiser. We sold almost 200 plates of lunch for the school to be able to pay staff and keep school doors open. I was so excited to see the number of people that came out to support them. By 12 noon, we were out of food and had to prepare more. God is awesome!

Every year our church puts on a large event called "Merry Christmas Gulf Coast" for foster care families. More than just getting presents, the Gospel is presented and each family member gets ministered to in unique ways  Today we took part in shopping so that that the families can pick out gifts at the event!