Spring Break!!

Oh my goodness I cannot believe I am just now writing about the best Spring Break of my entire life! Beginning at 4:00 a.m. on Saturday, March 6 and going until about 1:00 a.m. on Sunday, March 14, God did amazing things for us, through us, and with us!

Got started off kinda rough... Kasee and I went to be around midnight Friday because we were entirely too excited to sleep... we (thought we) had 3 alarms set to wake us up at 4:00 a.m....thank goodness my phone (singing Taylor Swift) went off at 4:00 and nearly scared us to death because our other 2 alarms did not go off!!! We finished packing, finished watching The Hannah Montana Movie, and even did the Hoedown Throwdown! :) We were supposed to leave at 6:00... well USI gave one of our vans away...it was 7:00 before we left, so we weren't too far off schedule. 15 1/2 hours later we were in our apartment...our 2 bedroom apartment...all 14 of us! God had already been working on me before the trip ever began, but boy did He do some work that night when we got to our home for a week. I was tired, cranky, and just wanted a shower and some sleep...the shower in our room didn't work (it became known as the Pioneer Shower), we couldn't come to a decision about how to put 6 people in one room (our floor was all matresses!), and it ended up being almost 1:00 before I got to sleep.

Throughout the week we did many service projects, worked with our kids at Rainbow Express, and had lots of fun! I cannot even begin to explain how much fun we really had. We laughed, we cried, we worked, and played a lot of card games (and put on an amazing talent show, if I do say so myself). Through all of it...the rain, the sunshine and amazing weather, the sweat and sunburn, the tears...God showed me so much about myself - how selfish I am, how LUCKY I am, and how easy it is to help someone out a little bit.

We cleaned out some pretty janky apartments, found all kinds of stuff I never really cared to clean up. We got to work at Mission Arlington for a day and help them do their daily thing - taking donations, organizing the food pantry (Clif bars... that's all I have to say). We did Rainbow Express (Backyard Bible Club/VBS) for kids at an apartment complex and that was by far my favorite part of the entire week. At the same time it absolutely broke my heart because the kids we worked with were so pitiful and needed love so badly. Part of my heart is still in Arlington.

So would I do it again? Absolutely. Every bit of it. From being crammed in a tiny, dirty apartment all week to the cleaning, barely sleeping, and crying over leaving our kids - I would do every bit of it again in a heartbeat.