Amazing gRace Day 2

Today was another great day.  We started the morning thinking that we were going to be doing a car wash to raise money for Heartprints Food Bank in Mount Vernon, WA.  The weather was pretty cold though and when we showed up we were relieved to find out that we would be doing something different.  The lady who runs the Food Bank is named Sue.  Sue put the kids to work right away.  Cleaning out Storage units and organizing donated items for a thrift store.  The youth worked very hard and at lunch had some time to chat with Sue.  They began to talk to her about the Food Bank and found out that many people come there throughout the week and each family receives about 45 lbs of food.  The youth also found out that Sue does not get paid to run the food bank and instead volunteers all of her time to help.  Right now Heartprints is just a food bank but Sue hopes to open up a Thrift store in the back that will help fund more food for the food bank.

Here are some pictures of the youth helping out










After serving at the food bank the youth headed out to the campus of Skagit Valley College where they were instructed to find somewhere on campus and take a silly picture.  These pictures I will post later.

Once they completed the picture Challenge they headed to what they thought was the final checkpoint.  Padilla Bay Shore Trail.  The Neon Yellow Flying Monkeys came in first followed by the Holy Crosses and then Genesis.  The Padilla Bay Shore Trail is a trail along the shoreline of the puget sound.  Team Genesis saw a bald eagle and a bunch of the youth played in the mud since the tide was out.  As we left around 4:00pm the tide was beginning to come in.

Here is a picture of them playing in the mud


The final pit stop was at a bowling alley in Lynnwood, WA.  There they met up with Ken Arneson, aka Pastor Ken, and each team bowled a game.  The team with the best average score received a time advantage of 2 minutes.   Team Holy Crosses earned the special time advantage.

Here is a picture of all the adults.  How often is it that the adults get to lay out in the sun and read a book on a youth trip.  Well today we got to and it was truly incredible.  The youth were getting dirty in the mud and we were relaxing


Today was another great day full of God's grace.