Ask many office personnel what is their most dreaded time and they just might say, “The staff or office meeting.” Many feel as though it is like pulling teeth to go. In fact, many may prefer going to the dentist than to sit in a staff meeting. One word most often defines them: B.O.R.I.N.G.

Yesterday I was in an almost 3 hour staff meeting. There are three of us-myself, the youth pastor (Ryan), and the office manager excellente’, Diana. Every Monday morning unless an emergency takes one of us away, or one or two of us are gone, we have a planned staff meeting at 9:30ish. I use the “ish” because Ryan tends to run late on Mondays. But that’s okay. Sunday is usually an extra busy day for him due to youth activities. Back to my thought: we had our normally scheduled staff meeting that went extra long. I have to tell you that our staff meetings tend to be disjointed. We spend a few minutes catching up, then we have a devotional thought or watch a video (often from The Chosen since Ryan likes it), we pray for various people/circumstances and then Diana brings us up to date on “stuff.”

Yesterday was somewhat different for us. Ryan had taken 14 people to east Tennessee to help with flood relief from Hurricane Helene. Yes, I know that was several months ago but the pictures of the destruction of where they worked are stark. (I’m going to leave the area where they worked unnamed because I never heard of it before). They helped work on some houses- erecting walls, putting insulation in crawl spaces, shoveling and using a wheelbarrow to take gravel for a drainage system on a house. One of the men is a licensed plumber and he and his teenage daughter spent time at another house doing plumbing. A good section of our staff meeting was spent talking about the team, what they did, and looking at pictures of the area.  To give you another perspective, these were teens and adults who gave up their lazy spring break to travel from Spencer to Elizabethton, TN to work for a week in mud, grunge and grime. They got sunburned on Tuesday and Wednesday and then froze their faces off and wore multiple layers on Thursday and Friday. All while sleeping on cots at night in a church building.

I am so proud of Ryan, his wife, Hope and the others who went. Those who went were complimented that they never complained, even though they spent hours in a crawl space hanging insulation. They were given tough jobs but they did it joyfully, never complaining. Ginger was certainly grateful for the house being built on a small lot given to her by her sister after everything she owned was washed away. So were the Fosters and others who had plumbing done after losing everything.  Oh…I failed to mention that we partnered with a group called IDES (International Disaster Emergency Services), an organization from Noblesville, IN well worth looking into.

Well done group. Thank you for your servant’s heart.