I could use some prayer right now. We have a big paper due Friday, a test on the memorization of Philippians 1 Friday, and various reading and other things happening this week. The Lord just unexpectedly blessed me with a few hours this afternoon so I am very thankful for that. I was supposed to work, but the lady I was working for didn't need me, so it works great for me. Just pray for all of us as busyness sets in and we all start to be pulled emotionally in many directions. It's tough, but not too tough for God. Pray for my singular focus to be on Him and Him alone this year so I can grow into the woman He wants me to be. Thank you all for your prayers and letters and encouragement, it means a lot. I can't wait to come home and see everyone!!!
Sarah Wennersten
October 18-24, 2010
Week in Review 6
Wow. This week was so much fun! I got to work super hard all week and then during the weekend also. Monday we left in the morning for Hartland Christian Camps. I was Kelsey’s co-pilot so I sat up front and was the DJ. It was a really good ride, very curvy and twisty, but overall good. Once we got to the camp we were split up into different rooms and got unpacked. The girls had three rooms with about 10 girls in each. I got to be with girls I hadn’t spent a lot of time with yet so it was fun to get to know them better. After we were unpacked we ate lunch (which was amazing, all their food was great) and then were off to work. I had heard something about us making a fire line but I didn’t know what all that would entail. I was soon to find out that we would be clearing forest 50 ft in from the road (we ended up clearing a quarter million square feet of woods). Most everyone was working the forest detail but some were put in kitchen and cleaning. I was really thankful to be working in the woods clearing because it was such hard work. So we were set up with gloves, ear plugs, and safety glasses and went to work destroying the woods. The boys were up on the hillside with chain saws and clippers clearing anything less than about 6 inches in diameter. Then there were lots of people taking all the clippings off of the hill and transferring them to the other side of the road. At the other side of the road were giant chippers which would then be fed the trees and shrubs which were then spit out into the woods and stream. At first I was working on pulling stuff off the hill with the north crew but then people started to run into bees nests and since I am allergic I couldn’t be climbing around up there. So I worked the chipper the rest of the weekend... which rocked. There was Andrew, Jesse, Julie, Marissa, and me most of the time working together. We would drag trees and lift them into the chipper which would grab the trees and slap them down while sucking it in. Branches were always wiping around so you learned really quickly to keep your arms guarding your face when you were near that. We had a great time. On Tuesday when we were working Andrew ended up dropping a log on my left thigh which pushed me to the ground pretty hard. I was really scared for a second because I thought it had hit my knee. Thankfully the tree fell on more meat than bone so I was ok. But that tree dropping incident was on top of me dropping a tree on my right thigh on Monday. I have a pretty sweet looking cut and bruise on that leg and a great variety of other bruises and cuts. But that was definitely not my best story from the week. Wednesday we were working the chipper like normal but were in a hurry because we had just a little to finish. The road we were clearing was built into a hillside and I was standing with my back to the downward slope helping load the chipper. I was handing the boys stuff to put in the chipper then and would turn away and grab something else, it was a good system. But one time as I was just turning and facing the chipper again something large and heavy smacked me in the face and the next thing I know I am falling backwards down the hill. As I fell and my back hit the ground my feet proceeded over my head and threw me into a series of two or three backflip summersaults down the hill. It was legit. They were full on, not to the side or anything, backflip summersaults. I remember as I was falling thinking, “I haven’t down a summersault since I was a little kid”. It was weird, but funny. When I finally stopped I was on my stomach facing the road. My mind was in a daze and I was mentally checking my body to make sure everything was ok. Well, I am perfectly fine. I was a little dizzy from the branch hitting me and from flipping but besides that and a few scratches on my back I was doing great. It was a pretty scary experience and I got a good adrenaline rush which made my heart beat pretty fast for quite awhile. So some guys helped pull me back up onto the road and then I kept right on working. I am so thankful that God kept me safe. That whole thing could have turned out really bad. But my face doesn’t have a scratch on it (weird right?), my back is ok, and my neck hardly even hurt. God is so good. So that is what our days from after breakfast to before dinner looked like... trees... and more trees... and then a few more trees. It just plain ol’ classic, good, hard, and painful work. I loved it. After dinner we had meetings at 7:00 which included Bob (the head guy) speaking, us doing skits from our Moody class( Tuesday), and book discussion on Wednesday. After our meetings we had free time in which we could go to the gym and play volleyball, basketball, football, soccer, dodgeball, or climb the climbing wall. I did all that except volleyball. It was fun after working hard all day to then go and play hard. I haven’t played ball in a long time so it felt good to handle a basketball again. And one thing that kinda surprised me, and that really surprised the boys I was playing with, was that I was rockin’ the football. It was so much fun. The football was smaller than a real leather one but still good sized and for some reason my inner football player kicked in and I was throwin’ spirals and catching crazy throws. It was amazing, I have no idea where it came from, suddenly I just had tons of energy. So that night especially was really fun because after running around throwing the football a group of us played dodgeball. The balls were small and didn’t hurt much and there were only 4 or 5 on each team so we had a great time. When the game fizzled out we just ran around nailing each other with the balls. I think we did all of that on the last night. The first night I climbed the climbing wall a few times and played some ball. The second night I went down the zip line and played a couple games of bump. Thursday morning we got to sleep in!!!! Actually, all week we got to sleep in because we didn’t have to be to breakfast until 7:30, it was great! But Thursday we had a late breakfast at 9:30. Being able to sleep in till 8:30 or later is unheard of! So after that gift of sleep was given to us we had to help turn over the camp which for me and two other girls meant cleaning girls public restroom. We got it done fairly quick but there was so much more we wanted to do. That thing needed/ needs to be deep cleaned so bad and it was hard to leave it not sparkling clean. We were the last ones done and we missed some of the instructions for when we got home. On the ride back I didn’t do so great. I felt so sick, car sick. I wasn’t co-pilot so I was sitting in the third row of the van and my sea sickness bands were not working. But, it wasn’t super terrible, just made me dizzy and nauseous. Once we got back to Joshua we cleaned the vans inside and out then had the rest of the day off to get stuff done.
Friday morning we had 5 am’s. The last couple weeks we haven’t been keeping up on our chores as a class so Monday before we left we were informed that we would have 5 am’s. So all 56 of us met down in the great room at 5 am ready to clean. 5 am’s are basically chores on steroids. Breakfast is not until 7:00 so during 5 am’s you have two hours to do your chore. This means that you get really creative on how to keep yourself occupied and busy for 2 hours. My chore for the day was vacuuming the dining hall, man hall, and men’s stairs. So my roomy and the boys room we were teamed with got to work. We moved all of the chairs and tables in the dining room and vacuumed super well including edging and all the small stuff. Girls can’t go in man hall so the boys did that. I found a dead mouse in the closet, first by smell then by sight. So we Febreezed the whole room trying to get the dead mouse smell out. We dusted all the chairs, light switches, walls, and every other surface we could possible wipe down. We even took q-tips to the chairs to get them super clean. I actually kinda enjoyed the 5 am’s because that is how I clean. I like the little details. So that really wasn’t too bad. Hopefully we won’t have to do them on Monday. We may get off with only having to do them one day which I think is pretty rare.
--- side note: right now I am sitting on my bed and just discovered a huge knot in my left calf. I am going to go foam roll it which will hurt like crazy.---
--- oh man...ouch... that one is going to take a few days to work out...---
Anyway, the rest of Friday was kind of a weird day. We had class 30 minutes early at 9:30 because a lot of people had to start work at 11:00. One of those people was me because I got to work high adventure this weekend!!! Our weekend at HA started at a run. Friday we had full activities which usually only happens on Saturday, but because it was a mens conference we had two HA sessions and paintball session. At 1:15 Andrew M and I led a HA session. It was an encouraging experience because Jordan put us on the Screamer first. He told us that our position was the super important because depending on how fast we got the men through the Screamer would set the pace for the whole session because the Screamer is where a backup usually happens. But, then he included that he put us there because “we were good” and he knew we could do it. So that put tons of pressure on. Thankfully we had a small group of 5 men so we moved fairly quickly. Apparently we got the first guy off the Screamer in record time according to Jordan. But there was one really awkward moment. I was working the top of the Screamer so I was harnessing the men and dropping them off. The last guy was one big dude. So it’s just me and him on top of the platform and I can’t get the belly strap on his harness hooked. Talk about awkward. Here I am fumbling with the strap because the dude is so big and there is no one else around. Thankfully the guy was really good natured and was trying to “suck it in”. Finally I got the strap connected and dropped him off. When he reached the bottom and Andrew was unharnessing him I heard him say he felt really bad because of the whole harness issue we had. Apparently that kind of thing is not as big a deal for men as it is for women. I got to work the balance beam again and was again surprised at how hard it is for most people. It is a total mental game because we have a board the exact same size to practice on the ground and people do great. But once they get up in the trees some people start flipping out. It was funny to me how many of the men had a hard time with the beam. One guy ended up clinging to my hand the whole way instead of just letting me stabilize him like we usually do. But then there was another guy who made me go practically to the other side of the beam and he pretty much ran across. I thought was cool. But it was another awkward moment when he says “you need to back up”, “no more”, “keep going”, “ you can’t be that close”, I was just thinking that I wouldn’t be able to catch the guy if he fell. But he made it just fine. Friday night I went to listen to the message that the men were getting at their seminar. There is a balcony where staff can sit to listen in. It was really neat to see such a huge group of men praising God in unison. It really touched my heart to see them worship. The message was really good and I got some good evangelistic thoughts from it. Then at 8:30 there was an illusionist. He was actually really good and not too corny. I enjoyed it. Jordan had told all of us working that day about the illusionist and was really excited about it. I thought it was funny until I realized that tons of the men were super excited, then it was hilarious. I never expected grown men to get excited about an illusionist... but apparently they do. The guy had a spiritual message to go along with his performance and ended the night with an underwater escape which was pretty good. Over all it was a good night.
Saturday we started work at 9:00. Jordan started off the day in his usual way with a song, Saturday it was the “zamboni” song. The subject had come up on Friday night when Jordan told us how he had sung this song in his interview to work here. It was a ridiculous song about the big zamboni’s used on ice rinks. It’s really funny and cool how he can just belt out a song without a care of who is around. So with that as our kick off we went to work. I didn’t lead any sessions on Saturday but I worked with cleaning the paintball guns and hauling (wouldn’t you know it) more trees and brush out of the woods to clear the snowboard hill. I also got to help pull nails and screws out of some lumber and then I moved it up to a lumber pile. So I would set up a couple boards, get under them with my shoulder, and then lift up. After carrying them up a slight hill I would set them propped up on a steep embankment, scramble up the dirt, reach down pull up the boards, and then carry them to the pile. Then I would slide down and do it again. I was a major core workout. So Saturday I got some more good hard work in. Then Saturday night after dinner I sat around talking with some of the guys from HA till dark. I ended up walking the hill in the dark by myself. It was actually pretty scary. I was walking really fast and trying not to think too much about wild animals. But when I was nearing the building I heard snapping in the woods to my right about 50 feet behind me. I was already scared and so I put it off to my imagination until I knew it was real. I started walking so fast. I just pointed my flashlight straight ahead and pushed forward. My lungs started to hurt really bad but I kept moving. I didn’t want to turn around and look because you know as soon as you look behind you something is right there when you turn around. Ugh, it was scary. But I made it to the building and to my dismay I found that the car that had driven by me was the guys I was at dinner with. Eric was with Seth and Jordan and felt really bad for not picking me up. Oh well. We couldn’t walk together because we would be even and there weren’t any more seats. But I must say that my heart did sink a little when I realized that it was people I knew who drove past me. Not that I expect a ride or anything but that walk is a little creepy by yourself in the cold and dark. At the building Andrew Lapp, Josh, and Jordan were working on a song. They actually sounded really good.
Sunday work started again 9:00. We started off the day by all going down the zip line which was really fun. I want to do it a bunch more times. I got to work a table saw and drill a hole through a metal pipe which was cool. Caleb and I worked together on a few projects fixing the teeter-toter (which involved drilling holes in a very heavy metal pipe and drilling more holes in the support beams and then connecting them) and hanging a sign. Then I worked on cleaning the HAG shed. It was so dusty. Saturday I had worked on it a little but today I got down to business. It is quite obvious that bachelors work there because you could have easily measured the thickness of the dust on some stuff. Me and anther gal re-stacked the boxes of paintballs and made a hallway to the back and made it all look good. We cleaned up the desk which won’t last long, but at least it will look good in there for a while. That place needs a woman’s touch badly.
We were planning on trying to go to “Pirates cave” this weekend but it didn’t work out. You have to swim a river to get the cave, which is an underwater cave, so being in a cave like in the rain isn’t really a great idea. So we might go during the summer. Tonight after dinner I walked up with Andrew and Eric and had a good talk. Then I started writing this very long week in review and doing a boat load of laundry. Even after washing my work clothes from Hartland twice they still smell like trees a little bit. I washed my sheets and for the life of me I cannot figure out how to fold the fitted sheet all nice like mom does. I guess there are some things I just won’t be able to do till I’m a mom :). Well, laundry is done, I’m all clean, my half of the room is clean, I have most of Philippians chapter 1 memorized, and it’s a little after 11. Think I will call it a week.
Alright so this week I want to be praying for Uganda. I’m not really sure why I thought of that country but it popped in my head. I am pretty positive it is in Africa or around there so there is lots I can pray for. I think I remember hearing about a war or civil war going on down there recently. I can pray for relief from poverty but most of all for the gospel to reach the people. I can pray for missionaries who try to minister down there and support groups also.
