Lutheran Labor

The confirmation program at our church includes Mentor Groups, assigning the students to small groups and matching each one with an adult who serves as the Mentor Group leader for monthly meetings and activities.  Each group is expected to carry out a service project during the year, and as a Mentor Group leader myself, I had to make arrangements for one such project for my five boys.  We decided to lend our muscle to the church women who spend all year making and boxing up hundreds of quilts to be shipped by Lutheran World Relief to those in need of them.  The quilters needed someone to unstack a year's worth of boxes of quilts being stored in the church, load them into vehicles, drive them across town, and pack them into the LWR truck.

The truck is in town today and tomorrow, but we knew there wouldn't be enough time between the end of the boys' school day and the end of the trucking company's business day for us to do all the work today.  So yesterday afternoon we met at the church to move the boxes into three vehicles (my SUV and two pickups).  Then we met up again late this afternoon to drive the quilts over to the trucking company and complete our task.  I had assumed that seventh-grade boys would be unenthusiastic about carrying out a service project and reluctant to do repetitive manual labor, but I was wrong!  They got down to business and moved those boxes much more quickly than we had expected!  I was impressed . . . and happily surprised that the service project was a relatively painless experience overall.

We found the semi-truck trailer waiting for us.

Even though we hauled in hundreds of boxes of quilts, the trailer doesn't look very full, does it?  Other churches in our community and other cities will be adding their boxes, too, so I'll bet it'll be full by the time it has finished traveling around.