At last, another mission trip (sort of)

This year, our church's adult mission trip is close by. We are going to Baldwinsville, NY, near Syracuse, to help a missionary pastor we support. John Stevenson, and his wife Roberta, are doing a church rescue mission at Faith Baptist Church there. Recently, a family that was in our church for years moved into staff positions at that church and at the Christian school they run. The McCarthys are dear friends of ours, and we are so excited with them to see God moving them into full-time ministry, which has been their desire for several years.

Anyway, a team from our church is there this week helping with work projects and helping them with their VBS. We aren't running the VBS--they are, but we're just providing a few more staff.

I was not able to get the time off to go for the whole week, but I went up just for the day this past Saturday with another team from our church to help them put on a roof on part of their church and school building. We have done several roofs in the past, but they were all asphalt shingle roofs, and this time, they wanted a metal roof. None of us, even our roofing experts, had ever done a metal roof before, so there was a lot of learning.

We left Brockport at about 5:30 Saturday morning and drove to Baldwinsville, getting there around 7:30. I rode with Matt and Cathy Sommer who will soon be my daughter, Ella’s, mother- and father-in-law. My daughter, Abigail, and a young man from our church, Guy Hills, also rode with us.

Abigail is staying the week with Bekah McCarthy and helping out in the VBS kind of as an unofficial member of the mission team from our church, since she is still a teen. Dan Sell and Ed Burch rode together for the day too, but in Dan’s truck. Abigail helped Bekah and Bekah’s friend Mo do some painting while we worked on the roof. From the looks of it, they may have gotten more paint on themselves than on the walls. Not really, but I’m sure they all spent a long time in the showers getting the paint off—their legs and arms were pretty well covered.

Guy helped scrape shingles off areas that needed replacing before lunch, and then helped us with the metal after lunch. After some figuring to get our bearings, since this was all new to us, Matt, Cathy, and I worked on the ground getting the metal sheets pre-drilled for screwing to the roof, then we’d lift them up to Dan and Ed for them to screw down.

We were able to finish one side and get another almost done. It was slower than we’d hoped with the learning curve, but hopefully it will go easier for them now to complete it. We did manage to get all of the roofs covered with tri-flex at least so the weather won’t hurt the plywood.

They fed us very well for breakfast, lunch, and supper: bagels, donuts, juice, coffee, and milk for breakfast, taco salad for lunch, and meatball subs for supper.

We went home at around 8:30 that night, very tired, but glad to be used of God to serve our brothers and sisters in Christ.