New Orleans - Day 3

This was the hardest day so far. Gene has been working on refinishing some windows on the house, up on scaffolding, scraping, sanding and priming them. They face the street, so they make a dramatic change in the look of the house - from old, nasty looking to clean and fresh. Watching him work with a power sander 12 feet in the air is amazing.

Brett spent the first half of the day digging and then filling in a hole. Turns out that the sewer line WAS connected already, no need to dig. Sometimes you have to dig a hole in order to find out that you didn't have to dig it. He worked on a couple projects, one was scraping and sanding the mantle of the fireplace. It's definitely older than any of us working on the project, and he's being very careful.

I got the job of the day - the one no one wanted. :)

There's an access ladder to the attic in the hallway, one of those folding staircases. The door and the molding around it are both very old, and were wet enough in the flood to have gotten a bad case of mildew. The mildew was dead, but it needed to be scraped and sanded, prepped for a fresh coat of paint (possibly the first new coat in decades?), which meant holding a power sander over my head for about 5 hours. We tried to use a rotary, smaller hand sander, but they wouldn't work, so the big boy went up the ladder with me a bunch of times. As everyone walked by, they would either comment, encourage or joke with me about either the good job I was doing, or how no one else wanted to do it. It made me determined to get it finished.

By 5 pm, the sun is going down, and the lighting isn't good enough in the house to keep working, so we're usually cleaning up and getting ready to leave by then. At 5:15, I was priming the trim work around the door with Kilz to prevent future mildew. Kind of a good feeling to have a project start and know you're going to finish. And I'll always know that this one part of the mission house was my own personal project.

I'm hearing more of Steve the home owner's story each day. He's a survivor in so many ways. He's had to fight government and local officials, and even got on the front cover of the local paper over one of the battles just to get his house back in livable shape. But he's gone from telling people not to pray for him to saying, "knock yourself out" when I asked if I could pray for him.

Please pray for Steve, his health and the ability to stay focused and work through all the details that face him on his journey to get back in his house. Also, pray that Jesus gets to be more and more real to him.

Pray for us, we are all dog tired, and completely wiped out at the end of today. I'm going to be sore tomorrow, and so will Bret and Gene. Pray for the strength to finish the week strong and get lots of projects accomplished so that Steve gets in soon. Also, pray for us to keep shining Jesus around the Big Easy. We keep getting opportunities to talk to people about why we're here, and they are always so touched to know people are coming to help. More on that later, but thanks for praying, all of you.