Project Nehemiah: YF Working bee

This year our YF has doubled and we have established the Teens Fellowship. We are so grateful for God bringing more youths under our care but we realized that we don't have enough space to do activities. Our Pastor talked to the committee and proposed we renovate the back hall which for some reason has been abandoned by the Sunday School and succumbed to a storage/trash room.

SO the YF committee has a new project, and I named it "Project Nehemiah" because the story of Nehemiah in the bible means to rebuild. Nehemiah, a mere cup bearer for the Persian king led the rebuilding of Jerusalem's walls. Our new pastor has been going through a series of messages from Nehemiah as we all seek to rebuild our church. It isn't just about physically rebuilding, but rather spiritually. But it's been great to take those messages and rebuild a new area for our youths. 

Our purpose is to create a multi-functioning room for fellowship. Our committee consists of six people with Hendrix leading the team. Our first step was to clear the mega mess in the room. Unfortunately I didn't take an before photos...but just imagine useless crap everywhere, dirty floors and windows, cobwebs, dust, dust and more dust. 

One of my duties before our YF working bee was to get rid of these old pews. I posted photos on Gumtree to get rid of 6 of these blue pews and about 20-30 wooden chairs. ALL FOR FREEEEE!
I posted it up at about 11.30pm and within 3 mins, I was flooded with texts and emails. It was cray. 

In the end, I managed to get rid of all the chairs :)
The blue pews went to a man from Point Cook (WEST SIDE!) who has a little church which was awesome. The wooden chairs went to a man preparing for Syrian refugees to come and the rest went to a local man. The guy helping the refugees even gave us a donation which was lovely :)
It was great talking to these people, especially the local because to cut a long story short, I mistook him for another person interested in the chairs...which caused him to open up about a tragedy in his life. He carried a lot of anger and disappointment and it was good for the youths to listen to him and provide some comfort. 

Anyway I picked up Kaitlyn in the morning and all of us started the day with prayer. Then we got to work! 

It was a good chance to build teamwork, especially for the guys :P

Thankfully it was a sunny day, so we could put all of the stuff outside. 

We threw out two organs which was super heavy. The guys had trouble moving it without smashing holes in the floor. 

A lot more people had filtered in by late morning and by lunch pretty much everything was out of the room. Aunty Carol cooked us a delicious lunch and we all took a break for about an hour. I was pooped by lunchtime, but recovered after a frozen coke. I've never drank an entire one, and it made me go on a crazy sugar high. Zack brought his dog along, so it was fun watching her run around. 

After lunch the real clean up began. I was in charge of cleaning up the hall while the others split off to clearing other parts of the church. It was really tough cleaning the floors because there were so many black marks on it. I had a team of about six people and we cleaned everything with bleach.
I was really proud of everyone, I think we did a good job :) 

The room looked so spacious after and smelled like...mmm chemicals hahaha

By the end of the day, Hendrix was crazy. It was probably because he was tired and fried from the sun. He spent most of the day stacking things in the skip. 

We finished at about 4pm and I was exhausted. Tara (Zack's dog) is so cute in the photo below. 

Thank God that it was a VERY SUCCESSFUL day. I seriously can't believe how much work we did with so little people. Also thank God nobody got injured. 

"Then I told them of the hand of my God which was good upon me; as also the king's words that he had spoken unto me. And they said, Let us rise up and build. So they strengthened their hands for this good work." (Neh 2:18)