Pearl's Before Mine: April - 3, 2, 1, Action!

This past week it got up to 99 degrees. I was just starting to get back into running again. Guess I have to stop and wait for the fall.

Just kidding.

BLOCK - In April, we had a guest speaker from the Mayo Clinic talk about tobacco and e-cigarettes to our students. Probably the most memorable thing from the talk was a picture of a table covered in school supplies. It turns out that there were multiple e-cigarettes shaped like school supplies in the photo, showing that they are marketing them to kids. A stat was given that 13% of high school students use e-cigarettes. For some reason I thought this was a high number, but when I asked one of our high schoolers, she thought it was too low. E-cig companies market them as "healthier" than regular cigarettes, show a diverse array of flavors, and obviously try to package them to look like pens (some even function as pens), flash drives, and pencil sharpeners. Scary stuff.

Action Day - One of my favorite parts of the ministry is when we actually go out and do something to show love for the neighborhood. I do often talk about our garden that is accessible to the community, but when we go out and pick up trash (often near corner stores, abandoned lots, and streets without many residents), it is a great feeling of visibly seeing positive change within a few hours of work. A couple weeks ago, we had about 25 people come out to help take action. A week leading up to Action Day, we handed out flyers to the neighbors to invite them to come help pick up trash for an hour on surrounding streets. Although we didn't get a huge response, there were multiple neighbors that came outside to clean up their yards. One group of volunteers did trash clean up, while another group headed to the garden to begin painting our new fence.

Quick flashback. At our garden day in March, I had papers with a picture of the blank fence along with markers for people to "Design our Fence" while they were taking a break from planting and weeding. I didn't really think anyone really took the time to do it. A couple weeks later, I get an email from one of their teachers with a design idea from a student that came to the garden day. He is interested in graphic design and put together the following picture. With a few tweeks, we are in the process of making this design happen.

Back to April. The base color of the fence got painted. Hopefully at the end of May, we'll have the final product. It will be so cool to see a student's vision come to life and us be able to facilitate that leadership. This is just a small picture of what we are about at 2nd Mile-helping people realize their own leadership abilities and be a support for that.

Every couple years or so, we get a huge supply of free mulch for the grounds of the garden. This particular batch had pine needles scattered throughout and it has made the garden smell so good. There was so much mulch that we are still slowly scattering it in the remaining parts of the garden.

Things coming up - We will have an in person summer day camp this summer! This will be our first exclusively in person program since March 2020. We are keeping it to a 20 kids maximum to allow for proper social distancing, but please pray for the health and safety of the camp, for the right kids and families to participate, as well as a fun time for the kids. It feels like forever since we've been in our sweet spot of ministry.

I'm also looking forward to the prospect of doing something different in the summer in regards to BLOCK. I'm still planning what to do and how to do it, but I'm hoping for something more casual, something more in person, and something more fun. Please pray that God would reveal what this is, how he wants to show his love to this neighborhood, and pray for my own strength and endurance in the process.

Enjoy some before and after pictures from Action Day!