Stuff the Bus

Thank you for your sweet notes to us yesterday! We appreciated them! Tracy, you are right...we came here on blind faith, not being sure what God had for us, but trusting His lead. There are some things we still feel like we don't know regarding our eventual future involvement here, but we are confident this is the area where He wants us. (And we hope He wants us here a long, long time.) 

Today I wanted to show you a bit more of our adventures from this past Friday! One of Ryan's big goals for himself in his new work is to try to make as many community connections as he can. I am SO impressed with how well he has already done with this. I've overheard some conversations at some of the events we've been to recently and am amazed at how much he already knows about area resources and what they do. And not just resources...but people, too! 

As part of his quest to make connections, meet people, and be part of community outreach at large, he signed us up to volunteer a couple of hours at Stuff the Bus in Decatur.

I did not do my own research very well on this, and for a long time, I thought Stuff the Bus was about collecting school supplies. (It made sense in my head that you would stuff a bus with school supplies.) But it was actually a food/paper product/hygiene product drive

Our shift was from 1-3 on Friday afternoon, and our Friday was hotttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt and sunny. The good news was that we were inside the bus, so we didn't have to worry about sunburns. The bad news was that we were inside the bus, and it was hotttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt. (DID I mention the heat?) 

We asked what we should do, and they said a fairly large donation had come in that morning, and it needed to be sorted. Food pantries were coming that evening to collect their share of the donations, and if things were already sorted, it would help the division of food be equal. 

So we spent our entire two hours on that hot, sticky bus, sorting food. 

And Ryan wanted to pretend to drive the bus, of course. :) 

And one more picture for the road:

We used a lot of sanitizer after that adventure - until we could get home to shower. If you smelled something questionable on Friday afternoon, it was probably us! 

It was a good way to be involved in our new community. Ryan is much more of a natural at this than I am, but I am glad he's teaching me to be better!