Digging, Building, Serving, and Rolling in the Mud

My parent's church held an event entitled 'ServeFest' this year, which my family chose to participate in. The entire church shut down on Sunday and instead of worshipping in the sancutary chose to extend our worship and talents outside the walls of our building and into the community. There were a variety of activities/service projects to choose from. Ranging from painting school playgrounds, filing, planting trees/flowers, and building benches to cleaning headstones at the local cemetary, doing a plethora of odd jobs at the fairgrounds, or building houses for low income families. We chose to build houses, as my dad is quite the craftsman and felt it would be something he could contribute on. We were told we would be doing siding and trim work. But apparently that was almost completed by the day ServeFest arrived. So what did we get to do? We dug holes for piping and spread dirt in the garage to prepare it for paving. On a normal day this would have been fine. And it was fine. But it was also pouring rain, so digging holes in a torrential downpour...let's just say it makes for some very dirty people. It doesn't help that my sister and I just enjoy getting dirty, so we "fall" in order to muddy ourselves up even more. Not that we needed it. Also, by the time our hole was complete (8 feet deep by 5-6 feet wide) the rain was coming down hard and the runoff from the roof of the house was causing our hole to flood and fill with water. Oh well! We had fun doing it anyway!

Dad, Laura, and I after a long day of digging and shoveling

Our mom isn't nearly as dirty...she was inside doing caulking all day!

Our jeans...before we hosed them off.