Of Black Paint and Dirt Roads

I had an AMAZING WEEKEND!!!! ahhhhh!!!  {I sent the following to Ms. Jeanne and she said I should copy it to a blog post... so here it is :) }

i will try to make this brief... i went on a service project trip with my youth group to Glenhaven Youth Ranch (Glenhaven is home to about 15 teens right now that have trouble at home n stuff, but they are NOT special needs kids) and the main purpose of our trip was to do work around the ranch, but i think that being at the ranch was a blessing for both me and for the people living at the ranch. We arrived Friday night and worked on painting fences on Saturday. We are so thankful that no one had any heat-related problems while we were working because we were outside for a long time and it was extremely hot!! We started painting around 8:30 AM, breaked for lunch at noon, and then painted corrals until 2:30. My new friend Alex who lives at the ranch suggested that everyone from Mosaic and from the ranch go swimming at "the Watershed" after we finished painting, so that's what we did!! We spent the afternoon swimming at the lake, and it was absolutely gorgeous <3 we were way out in the middle of nowhere and there was no one else at the lake, and there was this huge platform that we jumped off. It was great to spend time with the kids from Glenhaven and from my church :)

I loved being at the ranch; Glenhaven itself is wayyyy far out in the middle of nowhere, so there's no cell phone signal, no internet, no tv's, no nothin. They have 13 horses, a bunch of dogs, and all the people there (staff and residents) were really nice and welcoming. My youth pastor told me that apparently the groups that go out and volunteer there are always adults, so the teens living at the ranch were really excited that we were there because they don't often get to meet new people since they are living with the same people all the time. I enjoyed getting to know them :) I also loved being surrounded by God's creation with almost NO distractions, not even friend distractions or anything.

We had great times of worship and I was just reminded that God is really all we need. There are so many distractions in life, and all these things that we THINK are important, but in the end none of it matters. So i was just thinking about how we should fix our eyes not on what is seen, but what is unseen :)

I also loved working!!!!! I love doing work with my hands and physically working hard, painting fences was right up my alley. Me and my friend Faith and three boys from the ranch were out working pretty much the entire time while everyone else kept taking breaks..... so we are officially known as hard workers. LOL but it was a good feeling :)