Sunday, April 26, 2015

North Coast Church - Weekend of Service

Source: North Coast Church's Facebook

Yesterday morning Ryan and I participated in the North Coast Church Weekend of Service. It is one weekend (every 18-24 months) where church STOPS all weekend long and everyone goes out into the community to be God's hands and feet.

Source: North Coast Church's Facebook Feed

Feel free to watch last week's sermon from Pastor Larry about why we do what we do the way we do it.



Since Ryan volunteers with the 9th and 10th graders, we decided we would sign up to work their project with them. We ended up over at Green Oak Ranch, which operates as a Christ-centered camp, retreat, and recovery program for those battling against alcohol and/or substance abuse.

The church has left the building!

The students starting to arrive

The group getting ready to pray before starting the day's work

Three of Ryan's small group guys were there, so we teamed up with them for our first project - digging a 3 foot deep hole for a pole ;) The 9/10 group was helping to create a low ropes course on the campus and the five of us were designated to create the pole/ tire team building activity (where a group will have to work together as a team to lift a tire up and off of the pole without touching the pole or they will have to begin again).

They look ready, right?! 

The buckets were ready, so we better get to it!

The issue? THE GROUND! I don't know if you are aware of this, but the ground in California is HARD... LIKE ROCK HARD! We were having to dig through cray-cray clay, rocks, etc. Originally we only had a pick-axe and a couple shovels - which made the work pretty slow going. Eventually we were able to get a couple steel pike poles to help us break up the ground a little bit more.

Those poles REALLY helped!

Slowly buy surely we were finally able to get the hole deep enough for the pole. It was really a team effort (with most of the work falling on my loving hubby's shoulders ;)).

We put in the pole, filled the hole with quick-crete, and
got the site ready for team building enjoyment!

Well, as luck would have it, since we were professional hole diggers, we moved to another area of the course where folks would jump from one stump to another... and dug more holes for the stumps to sit in.

One of the kids brought a "hand held chain saw" with him, so they had to try it out!

Source: Fuel 9/10's Facebook Feed
Our second round of hole digging... 

And although the property is like a rock's throw away from our best friends' house and we also have a friend staying at the ranch for recovery we have never really been on the property. It is honestly like a little Wild Animal Park in the middle of Vista. They have such a beautiful grounds (and tons of animals - like donkey's, tons of goats and sheep, a petting zoo, etc).

One of their gathering areas on the property

Some of the landscaping going on by other groups at the Ranch
Source: @NorthCoastTalks Twitter

They had a ton of baby goats here. The looked SO FLUFFY!

I had to take a quick break from digging to pet this friendly donkey!

Ryan and I had only signed up for the 8am-12pm shift on Saturday, but they have shifts all weekend long (Saturday and Sunday from 8am-12pm and 12pm-4pm). North Coast was hoping to mobilize at least 10,000 of the weekly attenders on 400+ projects throughout the community. I can't wait to see all the before and after shots of everything we were able to accomplish this weekend!

It is tough work, but it felt great to get out there and really
BE the church... 

We are blessed to bless others! Although we are a bit sore from all of the manual labor, I am sure God is smiling down on North County because of all of HIS love being showered on our neighbors.

Do you enjoy volunteering?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Love this post, thank you for sharing. We also go to North Coast and did projects in North County and it was a great experience. Amazing to see the gratitude, and even more amazing to see God's children (but strangers to each other on earth) coming together as a team and making a BIG impact. Work that seemed nearly impossible was done quickly because of the number of people working together. "Be the Change..." love that quote!!