Mission Arlington!

So some of my girls put clothes in the washer 45 minutes before they had to be in their rooms, and now I have to wait for them to dry, so I figured I'd catch everyone up so I don't get taken off of JMob's blogroll.

The past couple of days at Mission Arlington have been awesome for the most part. I'm staying with the 8th grade girls, and unfortunately, 8th grade girls bring 8th grade drama. Yesterday, they were letting the drama get in the way of the work, and I reemed them last night. Jaron is really starting to wear off on me. Anyways, after about 2 hours of a cry fest and apologizes and such, all is well for a while.

The kids have been doing pretty good for the most part, and since you can read Nic, Jaron, and JMob's blog to find out what's going on, I thought I'd just tell you about some pretty cool stuff that God had been showing me through two of the youth on the trip.

The first kid is a little boy that is going to be in 7th grade. He's a little weird, but he has a good heart. No, a GREAT heart. He's probably one of my favorites. Anyways, all week he has been telling everyone about how he doesn't care a bit about what other people think of him, which is awesome, but more importantly, it really came in handy today. There was a kid who refused to have anything to do with out Rainbow Express (VBS) group the last two mornings, and this morning, our little 7th grader went up to the kid and started fanning him with a paper fan he made. I don't know about you guys, but I don't know many 7th graders who would do this, because it would look "weird" or "uncool", but this kid didn't care, and the next thing you know, the boy who wouldn't participate is coloring on a coloring sheet and hanging out, all because our youth didn't care about being cool. How many more people could I reach if I didn't care about what others thought?

Here's the other youth that's really been impressing me. There's a girl in my room who recently lost her mom to cancer, and when I say recent, I mean she buried her mom a little over a week ago. I think its impressive enought that she came, because I don't think I would be able to pull myself together enough to do so, but her attitude and work ethic this week have been incredible. She's the only girl in our Rainbow Express group that I can honestly say has put in 120% both days. Here's the truly awesome part. We were talking tonight, and she told me about how her dad was already thinking about seeing someone. Not only did she call and talk to her younger brother and calm him down and make him feel better about the situation, and not only did she call and talk to her dad and calmly and respectful explain her and her brother's feelings about the situation (which in turn led to her dad realizing he was making a mistake), she also told me that one of the reasons she took care of it tonight was because she wanted to make sure that she didn't have any distractions before we went out tomorrow, since tomorrow is such an important day. Talk about awesome. I don't know many 8th graders who would handle a situation so well, and be able to put mission work in front of family drama. To be quite honest, I wish I could be more like her.