Interesting Beginning....

Have you ever had things just not go the way they were supposed to? I was ready to call our trip "Murphy's Week" since anything that could go wrong was going wrong. 

Having arrived the night before so late the night before, we were supposed to be up at 5am to be at the Union Rescue Mission at 6am. We all set our alarms and went to sleep. When we all woke at 7am, we found that most had either slept straight through the annoying blips and beeps, or had the alarms on vibrate. Mine was, well I discovered my mistake at 4:50 PM, not am yesterday afternoon. We missed our morning serve, which may just have been a God thing... 

We then left to go to the beach for the spiritual discipline of silence and solitude. We found our spots and opened our bibles, only to be accosted by....wait for it...Lady Bugs. That's right, thousands of them! They landed in our hair (for those that have it), our eyes, face, clothes... If there was a spot on you, they were going to land on it. (I have actually come to believe that lady bugs are very poor fliers as the don't land with any precision at all, but rather they SLAM into your forehead, careening down to the ground or pants and ending up on their backs, which has a "turtle on their back" sort of effect on them. This is, indeed entertaining, but a nuisance nonetheless.) This all disrupted our time with God, to say the least.

After our lady bug bombardment, we went back to the church to make lunch and lunches to give our to the homeless in downtown L.A. I was then called by a contact here and tole that handing out lunches at random was dangerous, and should not be done. I thanked the Lord that we did not do anything stupid, and we then ate lunch at the church, and got ready for our next project.

At 1:30 yesterday afternoon, things started to look up. We put over 100 bottles of water in our cooler and took them down to the Manhattan Beach pier, all in our R.A.K. shirts and handed out water to people strolling the beach. Many people were blessed and we were able to share the love of Jesus in deed and word. One person responded to his water with the best question. He asked, "Why are you doing this?" We gratefully replied, "We just want you to know that Jesus loves you and wants to quench your thirst!" He answered, "Now I do!"

We took a look at the weather report for the week based on a  hot tip from Kelly (my wife), and discovered that it is supposed to rain on the 2 worst days for us this week. So I gave everyone about an hour of free/shopping time on the pier since we may not get the time we had scheduled on Wednesday due to rain. We had great time together and I believe that our need for flexibility brought us together as a team.

After dinner, we were able to have a great discussion about good things happening to bad people and where God is in all of it. We talked for over an hour and finally, went to sleep. 

Today we will actually make it to the Union Rescue Mission and serve with them today. Pray for us as we continue to serve and share the love of Jesus.

P.S. Early this morning, Kaylee Speisser woke up with intense pain in her side and abdomen. Her mom and one of our leaders, Jessica, took her to the E.R. at L.A. Metro. They are waiting on a CT scan to see if she is having an issue with her appendix. Please lift her up to Jesus. We will post more on her status later.

Eric