day of service #1.

my new year's resolution for 2012 is to make a solid effort to do good. 

last year, my resolution was to be more thankful.  after a full year of consciously thinking about all of our blessings, big & small, i truly recognize that blakey & i have a pretty amazing marriage & home & life.  

so now it's time to focus outside of us & on others.  i'm pretty darn excited about it.

to make it feel like a realistic resolution, we are going to attempt to have a day of service each month.  i honestly have no idea what twelve things we will be doing.  if you have any fun or special volunteer/service/good things you've done, please tell me!  we would really appreciate any ideas.

as with most things in life, you ask God to help & He provides.  so i prayed about our january project & received an email about our church's day of service in january!  {no joke.  that's actually what it was called.  how awesome is that.} 

there were a ton of projects to choose from - some indoor projects, some outdoors, some donating, some creating, some physical, some sedentary.  but one stuck out as exactly what blakey would want to do.  & to get him on board with my resolution, that sounded like the perfect place to begin.

framing walls for a habitat house! 

awesome.  outdoors & manly.  i had no clue what i would do, but let's give it a try.

we were in a group with a few 30something dudes from our church at a habitat house just a few doors down from the one we worked on last year {HERE}.  when we arrived there were only a couple of walls up, so we knew we had a full day ahead of us.

 {building one of the walls}

 {holding up a wall while it was being nailed in}

can you believe an entire house can be framed in a morning??  it blew my mind.  there were three habitat workers, a group of girls from the university of new hampshire, a few fellas from hands on birmingham, the lady who would be purchasing the house, & our group.  & we built a house.  pretty darn cool.

{our framed house at the end of the morning!}

month #1 is a success!  looking forward to where God will lead us.

love love,

kjp.