Cleanup in the Creek

We met for breakfast at 7:30am. Of course, all the guys had already eaten, so they just watched everyone else eat. The breakfast here in the hotel is great - a cooked to order buffet with something for everyone.

After we ate, we spread out all over the hotel lobby for quiet times. Each of our trip leaders wrote a devotional, giving us one for each morning. This morning we all read a devotion about our speech. So when we gathered again as a group to pray before starting our day, we challenged each other to really concentrate on building each other up with our words and stay away from sarcasm and biting comments. The students are doing great with it today!

We headed over to the St. Johns community, a poorer area of Austin. There we met Justin Lopez, a good friend of mine from college who is on staff at Austin Stone. He's heading up the church's inner city ministry in St. Johns. Justin introduced us to the community leader, who gave us a brief history of the area and sent us on to our work.

We spent almost 3 hours picking up trash in a big creek that is part of the community park. The stretch we cleaned was probably at least 1/3 of a mile. And the creek was really wide. We had a great time and wore ourselves out. The creek was spotless when we were through with it. Lots of community kids play in the creek, which has slabs of limestone throughout, so it's great for them to have a cleaner place to play.

A couple of students also got to paint over some graffiti in the bridge area, and a couple more did a little yard work! As we worked, we began to realize the need for times like this in certain areas of Kaufman which came to mind.

After a quick picnic lunch at the park, we headed down to Barton Springs Pool. This is a really cool (in more ways than one) spring-fed city pool. We had a great time playing elbow tag and more. After we all got used to the cold water, we enjoyed just hanging out and being refreshed.

Now we're back at the hotel to rest a bit and get ready for dinner and tonight's college leadership training!