Crystal Peaks Youth Ranch - A Day of Volunteering

TODAY, my son Ryan, 17, my son Mickaeljosef and I went with our church to Crystal Peaks Youth Ranch outside of Sisters Oregon for a one day mission trip helping to get the ranch ready for children.
Kim Meeder and her husband started the ranch in 1995 as a way to rescue horses and use it to help children, and Jenni Reiling from our church wanted to get church members involved in helping. Rolling Hills has come 14 times over the past five years.
It was a wonderful day planting flowers, getting flower beds looking nice, spreading bark chips, building a wall and so much more. A fabulous lunch of ribs and steak and salad was shared by all midway through the day.
I love sharing outreach times with my children. My husband had gone with our oldest two children and our church four years ago to Crystal Peaks and today was my turn. It is a neat activity to be outdoors with the kids, reaching out to help others.
I enjoyed hanging with the others, talking and sharing hearts and our journeys.
We had to get back a bit early as Ryan has Bible study and before we watch a movie with the kids, I just had to download the photographs . . .
It was a great way to spend part of Easter weekend. . . –thankfully I do not have to make the meal!

There's No Place like Well-Being

The man’s words just would not leave Kari the nurse’s heart. He did not have a safe place to go for a meal on Sundays.

During the weekdays he had a place, but not on Sundays. No safe place to just be on this most sacred of days.

Kari and her husband Les kept hearing the words and the words turned into a calling.

Open up The Well on Sundays.

Offer a home cooked meal.

Serve the home cooked meal on real china -- not on paper plates. Serve the home cooked meal on a table with a table cloth and warm candles burning and serve up sweet conversation.
Make it safe. With no judgments. Make it like home.

Call it Well Being.

And they did. And people came.

On the other side of town, another call came. This one for Dan and Sally Waritz.

Well Being needed help. Last minute help.

Would Dan answer the call?

Yes, he would.

”But, I’ll be the first to admit, when they told me who we’d be serving, I was hesitant at first. I will not pretend,” says Dan. “But after the one time, I knew this was where I needed to be.”

Now his community group comes back every month.

Last Sunday, they brought shepherd’s pie. And salad and dessert to share.

Kari and Les love having Rolling Hills Community Church helping http://www.rollinghills.org/ . It has eased the weekly burden, so they can focus on making those who need a safe place on Sundays to feel part of a community.

“For a lot of HIV positive people the church is pointing the finger. Here we do no preaching. We open up our church home to them. We serve them. It allows those living with HIV and AIDS to see that there are others in the church that care. Many of those who come have never stepped inside a church before. Some will then come to Sunday service. It is always in the background,” says Kari.

The people who come are etched into their hearts.

Dan says: “We notice that you see people each time you are here and all of a sudden you notice when they are not here anymore.”

And, you wonder if it is because of their health.

And, you are never ever the same again.

OUT OF THE COMFORT ZONE. . .

On Saturday a few girls from my senior high church Bible Study that I co-lead with Crystal Fricker met in Canby Oregon to assist at Saturday School which Claudine started for her struggling 3rd graders. After helping the students with school work and feeding them breakfast and lunch as they had not eaten that morning, we dropped them off at their apartments at about 1:30. Okay, we have so much in our comfortable lives, and sometimes we do not realize it until you see how others live.
One of the boys named Angel, what a sweetheart of a 9-year-old, so polite, lives in a small apartment with his mother who has health issues and cannot pick up the apartment. When you walk in the apartment, the blinds are all closed and it is dark in there and you have to straddle over clothes and shoes and food and toys and crackers all over the floor in every room, and Angel’s room had no sheets on the bed, which was two mattresses on the floor; his young mom has two other children who are younger and one is in diapers and she had run out of diapers.
Every room needs help, bless their heart, and we are going back tonight as a Bible study to assist in some small way. We only have about an hour plus, but with several of us we can get a lot done and bring her some hope. The mom said she is embarrassed to have us see her apartment but she is so overwhelmed. May we bring some light into her home and life.
Cornelia Seigneur
www.writermom.net