SGVServe.org

Virginia

Virginia has served on our team for several years, and for 2020, joined our core planning team. As part of our activities when serving, we will often “prayer walk” (walk and pray for the neighborhood) while we’re working on our respective houses. In 2019, her group worked at a house whose neighborhood included a man that was familiar with similar volunteer crews…

Mr. Joshua

On our second day of working at Mr. Sam’s house, Mark (our site supervisor) told us we were going to eat our lunch at Mr. Joshua’s house.  We grabbed our sack lunches and walked up the street to this house that had the garage door open. Sitting there in this empty garage on a folding chair was a gentleman smiling as we approached him.  We were introduced to Mr. Joshua. 

A previous ReachGlobal team met Mr. Joshua on a prayer walk.  Since then, most teams that have worked at Mr. Sam’s house have walked over to his house to visit with him during lunch.  Mr. Joshua said he looks out his bedroom window watching for the green ReachGlobal shirts or listens for the sound of the chop saw and then will go down to his garage and waits for the team to come over to his house at lunch.

We all grabbed a folding chair and sat in his driveway as this 77 year old man shared stories of his life.  In the midst of heartbreak, grief, joy, struggles, hardship and discrimination, Mr. Joshua stands firm in the fact that God has been and will always be with him.  One of the things he said that really convicted me was that he would not change anything in his life, especially  the bad stuff because it was all used by God to make him who he was.  I so often wish the bad stuff never happened and forget that God is using these things to help me in the sanctification process.  I need to stand firm in who He is, a sovereign loving God and remember Is. 55:8-9 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Mr. Joshua loves sharing with others about God and he especially loves to talk to all the ReachGlobal teams. We took a picture with him and printed a copy for him.  He asked for all our phone numbers so he could call us the following week to make sure we got home safely.  True to his word, he called each one of us to make sure we arrived home without incident.  It was so nice to get a call from him and to talk with him again. 

It was a blessing to meet someone who loves God and genuinely cares for others which reflects the joy in his life.

On June 16th, our team (the members from Evergreensgv.org) had our presentation. Unfortunately, Chris H, Denise and Paul Waters and Uncle Roy were unable to join us on that day, but were represented and there in spirit!

First, our team presentation, with our speakers…

And if you just want to see the slideshow up close and personal…

Long day. Hard day. Fast Day

We had a shortened day today, ending near noon. It was our last day on our respective houses. Leaving things in a good position for whoever comes after us. But it was also one to say goodbye to good friends made over the last days.

House 2, hadn’t seen their home owners since day 1, had an unexpected, unplanned visit from their homeowner. Going from working on their home with just a name printed on a notebook to meeting them face to face was such a sweet experience.

We all said goodbye to our families, sometimes through broken spanish, but always with both joyful and heavy hearts.

We went home, washed up and had our debrief meeting. Lessons learned, joys experienced, reflections, and even some difficult experiences were shared among all of our team members. It was humbling to hear how much we needed to count on God for direction, identity and humility while we had worked on restoring the homes and building relationships

Immediately following the meeting, we had a team Texas BBQ dinner with the ReachGlobal staff.

We sent Lorin home to go attend a wedding tomorrow, and the rest of us retired for our last night at our home away from home.

Then Tommy taught us how to make his famous biscuits

House 1 Photos

House 2 Photos

Today’s video!

Long day. Hard day. Fast Day

We had a shortened day today, ending near noon. It was our last day on our respective houses. Leaving things in a good position for whoever comes after us. But it was also one to say goodbye to good friends made over the last days.

House 2, hadn’t seen their home owners since day 1, had an unexpected, unplanned visit from their homeowner. Going from working on their home with just a name printed on a notebook to meeting them face to face was such a sweet experience.

We all said goodbye to our families, sometimes through broken spanish, but always with both joyful and heavy hearts.

We went home, washed up and had our debrief meeting. Lessons learned, joys experienced, reflections, and even some difficult experiences were shared among all of our team members. It was humbling to hear how much we needed to count on God for direction, identity and humility while we had worked on restoring the homes and building relationships

Immediately following the meeting, we had a team Texas BBQ dinner with the ReachGlobal staff.

We sent Lorin home to go attend a wedding tomorrow, and the rest of us retired for our last night at our home away from home.

Then Tommy taught us how to make his famous biscuits

House 1 Photos

House 2 Photos

Today’s video!

Mathias’ home emergency was on our hearts, all the teams would pause and pray for Mathias and Helen, and the difficult situation their family is experiencing. But we also have hope in God that he’ll take care of all of them no matter what.

As we continued to work on the four homes, Zohreh and Lorin moving from Team 3 to Team 4 to help them at the Wright home.

We invited all the homeowners to join us for a dinner back at our home for the week, The Grove, and fortunately, the Wrights were able to join us for dinner

We all shared, including staff, our family guests, and Evergreen as volunteers. It was heartfelt and a joint appreciation of God using each of us to experience community, trust in God and hope. It was hard to tell if any one part received more benefit or blessing than the other.

Photos coming soon…

House 1

None yet!

House 2

House 3

None yet!

House 4

Here’s today’s video…

Today moved faster. With our Safety and prayer training covered yesterday, we could go directly to the site after breakfast and our devotional.

Green Shirts Now that we had the lay of the land, we returned to our respective houses, teams same as yesterday. A couple of the teams bumped into each other at Home Depot as they were picking up supplies and we found a few people asking about our green shirts.

Reach Global likes us to wear the shirts so we are easily identifiable onsite, and when we do our prayer walks, to makes us look unified and less threatening.

It’s worked in both situations. People ask us what we’re doing in town, and we’re able to let them know we flew in from LA to help out and we’ve been doing this for years, be it Mississippi, Oklahoma, New Orleans or Texas. In the neighborhoods, it’s been a conversation point when meeting people when we pray and walk in the area, or when they drive up to talk to us as we work outside.

It’s a win-win situation. One of our teams met a gentleman that sits and waits in his garage for “the green shirts” and then hopes they’ll stop and chat a while. Our team sat, chatted about spiritual and other things, and then prayed with him.

Other teams met neighbors who were in need of assistance with there homes, and we were able to give them applications for Reach Global.

Here’s a brief update on the teams.
(for Team and house descriptions, go check https://sgvserve.org/2019/05/20/2019-day-1-first-day-on-our-sites/)

House 1-our 3 man team. More work was done on the tile installation, including tile cutting and placement.

House 2-the team continued their work on the flooring, baseboards and more, but the highlight was meeting a gentleman who waits in his garage for the “green shirts” to come by and chat with him

House 3-While our team had a problem with conversing in Spanish, we were able to speak with the daughter of the homeowner in English, as she stopped by and is versed in English.

House 4-Our team continued to work outdoors, but the weather cooperated, only sprinkling while we were working, making it not as hot as expected. We were able to pray walk, and pray with the homeowner to learn more of their circumstances.

After a hearty breakfast and our safety training, we had training for safety and prayer walking. It was a great, simple and non intimidating session about simply walking through the neighborhoods and praying for things that come to mind.

We split up and went to our respective homes

House 1: Paul, Roy and Art
House 2: Craig, Tommy, Mona, Virginia, Dewey, Gary, Patrick
House 3: Chris C., Denise, Zohreh Lorin, Nate, Mathias
House 4: Jeff, Chris H, Pam, Venetia, Hugh, Peter

House 1: McCloskey Tiling a back splash, Texturing, painting ceiling
House 2; George – prep kitchen floor for ceramic tile, Dewey and Craig worked on baseboards. Virginia, Mona and Patrick, prepped paint on door frames. Homeowner wasn’t present today, the house has been vacant since Harvey. Same house our sister church, Seeds of Life worked on last fall.
House 3: Cornejo – Sanding and mudding. Drywall prep, met family, speaking spanish. Interesting situation where house had some pre-existing roof issues, but then Hurricane Harvey came and exacerbated issues to the point of flooding. Since it wasn’t wholly attributable to Harvey, homeowner didn’t qualify for some direct funding
House 4: Wright Siding, removal and prep for painting. Rebuilding subfloor and structure.

Each team did prayer walks in the area, and sometimes was able to pray for the homeowners. During one of our prayer walks, our presence in the neighborhood attracted enough attention that people approached us to ask what we were doing in the area. We explained we were here to help, and two parties asked to sign up and get more information.

We returned back to the camp to enjoy hot showers. Oh, on a related note, please pray that some plumbing issues we’re having get resolved. Also, after dinner, we exchanged notes and experiences so we could share from our various sites.

What a day. A hot, no, humid, no, hot and humid day.

A few brave, faithful and appreciated souls saw us off at LAX at 5:30AM. Many of our support groups came to send us off, including our Sr Pastor Rocky, and our recently retired Sr Pastor Cory and his wife Reine stopped by as well. Rocky prayed for our team, then left to go to church to preach, we went into the terminal.

In Houston, we met up with Chris Hearn, joining us from OKC, and enjoyed a quick mexican lunch

On the plane, Roy met Gary, who was flying to Houston for his Father-in-law’s funeral, and Roy was able to talk and pray with him.A

Paul and Denise arrived and our team was complete! We met up with Dan from ReachGlobal.

His presentation on the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey had some alarming statistics. Six months after the storm, the suicide rate started to climb.

Pastor Kyle and the team from Seeds, our sister church, had been here in early October. Kyle had mentioned to Dan that he had seen the value of long term commitment to a region. Ongoing rebuilding of a region can take years, and the community can notice when the church keeps returning.

After a quick run to Walmart for lunch supplies, sunscreen and other items, we returned back to the church.

Currently, the plan is to run 4 teams. Fortunately, 3 will be indoors, and one will likely be outside doing some framing. We hope the weather will be comfortable, but compared to southern california, wow, it’s hot and humid here.

Finally, still full from the big lunch, we munched on some fried chicken, got some logistics out of the way, and Jeff shared of God’s goodness and faithfulness in times of change.