This is my first blog so I am trembling as I do this.
However I had to because I believe so much in the work we did through Lagniappe.
Our people were great, everyone contributed greatly to the build I was on.
I know my son Daniel who participate in another build took so much care to be a good stewart of his time that he chose work over play even on Saturday morning as we were winding our build down.

I hope we can do this again soon.
The term I coined for Lagniappe is "estra grace"
I hope we can work on extending more extra grace in our own community in a way that restores individuals to be drawn to our Church.

Pictures from 1st 3 days

Here's the link for my pictures on shutterfly:

http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=2AasW7hi2csWKW

I emailed it to some of you already--but I got tired of typing!!  I can add more pics if you want to send them to me.  

Had a great time and I'm ready to go back.  

A+ Trip!

Mark & I were so excited to be a part of this trip! From the word "go" it was well-organized, grounded in prayer and bathed in team unity... How much fun we had putting sweat equity into old and new friendships and seeing everyone contribute in their own unique way. There seemed to be no age barriers as teens worked along side adults, all of us wanting to please our site leaders who were patient with our crew and very good instructors.

We see lots of opportunity to keep building our own church by making this trip a regular one.
As our 3 rocking chairs displayed, we showed:
"Love in Action"
"Truth in Deed"
"Joy in Service"

We were amazed how everyone brought different gifts and talents to the trip! The kitchen crew was awesome... Way to go Clark, Dave and 1st Pres!!!

Ready to go back...

Rhonda

Rocking Chairs

One of the highlights of the day at LPC is sitting out on the deck (the former loading dock) in the relative cool of the evening after a hard day of work, a shower and a good meal (they were all good). Taking a cue from a couple of other groups, FPC left behind three new and re-painted rocking chairs as well as a unique wall sign. The sign is actually a carved piece of LBL laminated board (16 layers thick, or so). John Bursi provided the carving while Janie Davis lettered the sign. (Photos are from the LPC blog, which has photos of all of the signs)

Kaboom Playground on Good Morning America

Here's the video from Good Morning America about the Kaboom playground build. Somehow they cut out the excellent footage of FPC folks working on the deck. Go figure.
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=5183689

Thanks

Thanks for a great week. Your hard work really meant a lot to the people of Bay St. Louis.

Kaboom Playground build

Several folks from the FPC mission trip joined Lagniappe interns on the Kaboom playground build on Saturday morning (at least until thunderstorms rolled in around 11:30 a.m.). Good Morning America was there filming and apparently will air a segment on it tomorrow. Here's a link to the LPC blog post on the Kaboom build: http://lagniappechurch.blogspot.com/2008/06/kaboom.html

The Big House - pictures from Saturday

Here are three pictures (it took three) of the Big House from Saturday afternoon
It is hard to believe that this was a slab and a few walls at the start of the week

Great Trip

Thanks again to everyone for a great trip - particularly the staff at Lagniappe Presbyterian Church.

This blog is to allow folks to more easily share trip pictures and thoughts.