Vancouver Serve 2017 - Day 3

Today the entire serve team helped to clean up garbage around the neighbourhood of the church. My group spent all 3 hours laughing and chatting while still staying somewhat on track. The highlight of the day would probably be coming back along the path we went and seeing the difference that we had made.

At the end of the day the teams all had a surprise. Because of the cleaning that we did, the neighbour of the pastor here had his faith restored in us, the youth of the world. He decided to come to the church and come see what it was like — he hadn’t entered a church in decades! He thought that he was going to feel something the second he entered the church but he didn’t. He asked if he could show the pastor a poem that he had written after a family member had passed away 2 months earlier, apparently it was amazing. Before he left he made sure that the pastor knew that he was going to come to the block party that we are going to host on Friday.

This amazed us all, to think that just because we worked for 3 hours to clean up the neighbourhood someone might return to Christ and become a follower.

For dinner we had a refugee Mexican couple here who made tacos and lots of extras. It was delicious, though not as spicy as I expected.

For chapel we were told how James and John both wanted to be at the left and right hand of Jesus in Heaven. To us it seemed so arrogant of them and the disciples thought so as well. Later during small groups time my leader summed it up very well. He said that it was like there were two sides of us fighting over control of what we want to do — one side wants what we feel is right and the other side wants what is God’s right way. It applied to us in the way that most of us probably wanted to stop cleaning up garbage and wanted to just be selfish and want what we want. It’s the same with James and John, they had 2 sides fighting at the time but for them the side that wanted what they wanted won and made them selfish and arrogant.

Overall I’m glad about how this day went and look forward to tomorrow.

-Daniel Rodermond