The Staff House

This week a church group who had originally planned on building three houses wound only being able to build two. The extra house was assigned to the intern team to build during the week.

Some interesting things happen when the interns get to build a house. All summer long the interns are working at everything but building houses so that the groups who come down can build houses. All summer long they are working harder than the groups, but at what feels like quite a distance from the actual "work."

The groups get to come down, connect and fellowship with a family who they build a house for. The interns get to watch this happen from the sidelines, where they are executing the tedious gruntwork.

So when the interns get a house, they go crazy. Think back to when you were just beginning to have romantic interests. Think back to how you couldn't take your mind off of that other person. No matter what else was going on around you, no matter what you were supposed to be getting done at the moment, everything you did was either directly or indirectly done with the goal of getting closer to that person. It's a desperate, longing desire that fills you with joy when it's satisfied just as quickly as it fills you with despair when you have to face even a few moments separated from it.

This is what the interns are like when they get a staff house. It's really quite amazing. Because of video problems, which I'll explain in a moment, and because I was letting someone else take over my normal responsibilities so they would be ready to take over when I left, I had a week essentially free of specific responsibilities. I spent the entire week basically serving as an intern, trying to do whatever I could so the interns could build for and be with the family they so desperately desired to connect with. Sometimes I got annoyed when the interns' focus on their family was so intense that normal duties or routines were neglected or ignored. But sometimes I was able to let the normal routines fall to the side and enjoy seeing a group of people so passionate about taking advantage of the opportunity given to them to share some love that they couldn't really be bothered with anything less important.

I don't think it would hurt if we were more in love with the people around us and the God who ties us all together. I think it would be awesome if we were so enamored with the idea of living love that our normal everyday behaviors, that we have convinced ourselves are necessary, fall to the side and get forgotten.

On to the video. As I've mentioned before, Michael and I were originally planning on shooting several documentary/promo videos for Mission Discovery this year as we traveled around. But as the summer started we could tell we had been given too many other things to do at the same time and we had not come prepared. So the video fell to the side until this week. Unfortunately on Monday we discovered a nice set of malfunctions with our video equipment that made it essentially impossible to film.

A church group from Austin, Texas, discovered our plight on Wednesday. On Friday they casually handed us their camera, the exact same model as ours, and told us not to scrap our video projects. So during my week "off" I will be story-boarding some ideas and scheduling when I want to shoot what in Guatemala, and Michael will be doing the same. If it all works out, we will have a grade-a video showing Mission Discovery's work in Guatemala by the end of the summer.