An update, and an explanation

Well, 2 wks ago we had a fantastic time at our outreach.  We were able to help a young lady get moved into and settled into her new place.  It was so fun to share food and conversation, laughter and love, as we served her.

I love those evenings of outreach and sharing God's love in our community - they are such a practical expression of a different way of viewing life to our world - and they seem to always make a difference to us and to those we serve.

For those of you who are not real familiar w Mtm's approach to service, let me kinda give you the idea.

We serve by helping people in any variety of ways - we have moved people, built laundry rooms, provided furniture, cleaned out houses, cleaned out yards, painted, landscaped and on and on the list could go - but we only serve in places where one or more than one of us knows the people we are serving.  We call this serving in relationship.  The reason we do it this way is that we feel it is the relationship - the love - that REALLY helps people - not the moving, the furniture, etc. And by serving, by sacrificing, by loving even when it costs us something, it allows the relationships to grow in trust.  Plus sacrificing means that we give up something of value for someone - and that value is not lost, it is invested in the other person's life.  In that sacrifice, they can find more value in themselves.  So, by serving and sacrificing, we literally can give someone value, or more precisely, we can awaken them to the value they have already been given when God made them.  We find that loving people in this way gets our minds off ourselves and helps us see what life is really about better too - so we find our true value better too!

You see, at Mtm, we spend a lot of time developing relationships - friendships.  And we spend a lot of time talking about, and working at, living life differently - less focused on getting more, buying more, being more, etc and on living to Notice the Goodness of God and relish that and live in the goodness of the moments and to Notice the brokenness of people (that makes them such a pain sometimes) and the wonder of people (that makes them worth more than anything else on this planet).

We are tired of a world that is so consumed w more - and we are determined to do our best to live differently and make the world a better place.

Serving is one of the ways we do this.

We will continue to serve and enjoy time being in our world.

Hope this opens up your minds a bit to the way Mtm works - if you are interested in hanging out w us (which by the way is super laid back and fun), we are going to be together next Thursday, the 29th of March, from 645-8pm at McAllister Recreation Center in Lafayette - which is just off 20th and Schuyler Ave.

as always there will free and excellent child care for kids up to about 5th grade and for older kids, the center is really a fun place to hang out.

Mtm outreach tomorrow night

We will meet at McAllister at our usual time tomorrow night, the 15th - 645pm - and we will go from there to our outreach - which will be moving someone into their new place!!

there will be food and good conversation as there is not tons to move in

this will be pretty informal so come ready to hang out, chat, and enjoy some time together!

looking forward to seeing you all!