Westside Family Church

The Westside team arrived late last night to Sarasota.  We are exited to be attending Church of the Palms this morning, and ready to jump into service this afternoon.

The girls were exited to start work this afternoon. We headed out to a local church that has some pretty severe hurricane damage. We will be working on roofing and cleaning up the rest of the afternoon.

First full day in Sarasota was awesome. Spent the afternoon doing hurricane clean up and then spent the evening watching the sunset. Tired and sore but ready for tomorrow.

Tired and sore this morning but ready for another day of ministry. Back at First Presbyterian all day.  Working on power washing and roof repair.

We had a wonderful day at the aquarium and the beach yesterday, but we’re ready to get back to work today.  This morning we are serving at Winters Garden. They are a pop up food pantry/community garden serving about 70% of their county who are in need of food assistance. 

We are all finished up for the day. Spent the afternoon at First Presbyterian doing more roof demolition, finishing a bridge project and fellowship.  We were gifted heartfelt thank you notes from the congregation that we will cherish for years to come.

Here we are on our last day. This week has absolutely flown by. This morning half of us are at Bethel ANE and the other half are doing produce harvesting at a farm.  

Bethel was hit hard by hurricane Ian, they have a lot of roof and water damage. They will be getting a new roof and ceiling soon, so we are cleaning and prepping the sanctuary. Also cleaning the extensive water damage.

Spent the afternoon handing out food boxes at a local food pantry. This pantry feeds around 1500 people every week out of a building the size of a small garage.  

We met so many amazing volunteers and the wonderful people in the community.

To top it off we made a tortoise friend.

The team has feelings of exhaustion and fulfillment.