Kansas City, MO - Day 4

Day 4 update of my time in Kansas City.

This morning was much earlier than any of the others, having devotions at 7:20 am. After that, I ate breakfast and then we headed out to the River of Refuge. The River of Refuge (http://www.riverofrefuge.com/) is an outreach of the River Christian Fellowship for the working poor to be a place of shelter so that they can earn money to actually buy a home themselves. The building itself was once a hospital but has been abandoned for 10 years, at least until John Wiley and his church bought it. It is an incredible story of faith of how they were able to convince the board to sell the building to them for $1 million and miraculously raised $60,000, the down payment, in 60 days with the last $8,000 coming in at 10 minutes before the contract was to be signed giving ownership of the building to the River Christian Fellowship. Now they are doing demolition and reconstruction of the building to make it into living quarters for families, offices, and, one of my favorite parts, future dorms for an Ignite campus in 2012. Upon arriving, we were given a talk by John Wiley on how they got the building and how their church is merely doing what it can with the means it has. They work on the building with as much as their money will allow them and they are saving as much of the original building as they can. So then we were introduced to the "foreman" for our work, Ron, and he then guided us in a basic outline of what we'd be doing. After that, we got hard hats, gloves, and glasses and split into our missions teams to await assignments. Two teams tore up carpet and another team took down ceiling tiles. My team was split in two with half of us rolling up the carpet and throwing it down to the dumpter while the other half, the group I was with, was to unroll the carpet so that it laid flat in the dumpster thus allowing for mor stuff to be put in. However, before we went to the dumpster, my half group (Colleen, Bobby, Maria, and Alyssa) followed Kevin, one of the men from the River, to down a pitch dark hallway with a very noisy cart to get plywood to put up against the windows so that they wouldn't get broken when the carpet was thrown down. It was a lot fun in that hallways but pretty spooky as well. The first three hours with the dumpster passed quickly enough. Our work wasn't hard and we had fun. After a while, the carpet was getting really hard to pull up so we were called in to take a break and then we got to help pull up carpet. It was really energizing. I never knew how tightly carpet was glued to the floor or that it could come off in two pieces. But I felt so accomplished after pulling up a piece. Then we went to lunch and we learned about the rest of our day. (I won't spoil that for you just yet and let you read it as I did it.) Then we went back to work. This time I spent a lot of time pulling down wallpaper. Then I started gathering up trash and throwing it out into the dumpster. I threw away wallpaper, carpet, wooden edging, and rubber baseboards. Then I helped take down rods in the ceiling and door frames took them to a back room where they were holding all the stuff they wanted to re-use. Then I sat around for a little while with other people and we got to put a few holes in walls that would be demolished. It felt so good. Then we were thanked for our help and came back to the hotel for about an hour before we left for dinner at Panera Bread. So we left for Panera and had a great time just hanging out and eating. Then we went to the International House of Prayer a.k.a. IHOP (http://www.ihop.org/). It has been open for 11 years and has 24-7 worship and prayer. People from all over the world come to pray and worship there and the worship team switches every two hours. Each two-hour session there is a different emphasis that changes the influence of the worship. We only got to spend an hour there and it went by way too quickly. Krista said that we will probably be able to go back again before the trip is over. I really hope so. It was so inspiring to see people, knowing they're from all over the world, all in one place worshipping the same God. I hope that everyone gets a change to go there in their lifetime. Now I'm back at the hotel and will go to my room, relax, and get some sleep before tomorrow's full day comes.

I pray that the Lord will keep you safe and that you would feel the immensity of His love for you.