Fun Friday Night Serving

Good Saturday morning! Breakfast started an hour later today so we were able to sleep in until 7:15am or so. A hard rain on the metal roof woke us up briefly last night, but as it says in Ecclesiastes 5:12, "Sweet is the sleep of a laborer!".

I have to tell you about Barrett last night.... He and I were assigned to kitchen duty, along with a couple staff people and a guy on our team named Keith. We weren't sure what to expect since we don't know the kitchen layout or exactly how they do things here. B and I got there a little early so we did our best to figure things out.

Eventually a staff guy named Sam came by and we learned about putting bleach in the rinse water to disinfect. Good plan. Things started picking up.

Then came a change, which is getting closer to the cool part of the story. The staff needed some strong arms and backs to help take down chairs, etc. in the "barn" area where graduation ceremonies were held earlier that night. Barrett was comfortable staying in the kitchen working with the team while I was about 30 yards away in the barn so we split up.

OK, here's the cool part. It took me over an hour to help in the barn. I checked in with him every once in a while but each time I did, he was working hard. When I got there some almost 90 minutes later, he was still working hard, right along side the others.

And this wasn't dusting or some easy stuff like that. He was elbow deep in kitchen clean-up. Washing dishes. Drying. Putting away. Mopping. Wiping counters.

Persistence. Servant's heart. Barrett totally scored. I am so proud of him.

It was around 11:00pm by now. He had snuck a nap in earlier in the afternoon so he was still pretty wired. We watched a bit of Mary Poppins that was playing on the VCR. We also played a billiards game Barrett invented where you only use the cue ball (the other balls have to be paid for and we don't have local currency in coins).

We had over an hour of fun and then headed back to the cabins. On the steps through the woods we heard frogs jumping all around us and a chorus of the most interesting bird (and monkey?) sounds serenading us in the moonlight. The stars were incredible! It was a great night.

Everyone else on the team was snoozing by the time we tip-toed into the cabins. We climbed up on our upper bunks that were moved together and dozed off together. The end to a very full day of serving.