NEW ZEALAND TRIP POST: The Death House

8/29

Well it’s Monday which means that the fun and games aspect of New Zealand life is over and it’s back to work again.  Typically, in my everyday life I find Monday’s to be tough days to get up and get going but this morning I found myself ready to get back to the job site and tackle my next task, that was until I found out what exactly it was.

As soon as our morning meeting ended, everyone started grabbing their stuff and heading toward the parking lot to get in the vans.  Before I could make my way out to the parking lot, my leader John pulled me aside to let me know that I would be going to be working with him today.  My heart sank.



Working on the remodel project



For the majority of the last week, my two leaders had been working on separate houses. Rich had been leading our group on the work site while John had been taking groups of 4 or 5 people off with him to another project house.  This particular project was a remodel job that we were working on and each day as the group came back, you would have thought that they had gone off to war the way they were returning.  They had even begun calling it the death house.  I’ll spare you all the horror stories and just say the house was not exactly sanitary and leave it at that, even though that may be putting it way beyond nicely.

Needless to say, I was less than thrilled to have this assignment and when I arrived at the project house, I realized that the descriptions people were giving were pretty dead on accurate.  Today couldn’t go by quick enough but it really made me think that I am extremely lucky to live the way that I do because not everyone is as fortunate.  Sometimes we take a lot of what we have for granted.  We expect it to be a certain way because we are used to it but we don’t often consider the alternatives.  What happens if it was all gone tomorrow?

Hopefully you will never have to know what that is like but that doesn’t give us the right to take anything we have for granted.  I urge you all to look at your homes or your lives and find the greatness in them.  Be thankful for those things.  Never forget that we are not entitled to these things but rather that we are fortunate enough to have them.