Progress!

A group of 5 from St. Stephanus St. Paul gets extra credit for the work they did on Thursday when they cleaned out the "Beast" crawl space below the stairway in St. Mark Lutheran in Rushford. They removed the landing to get to it from above and the work is done! To God be the glory; but hats off to these brave men and women for taking one for the team!

Saturday, my family and I went to Rushford with a sweet delivery -- an entire preschool full of toys, games, books, puzzles, supplies and imaginative play items donated from the families of Woodbury Lutheran Church Preschool to Little Lamb's Preschool at St. Mark. Most of it, including some big items such as an art table and chairs, was new. We met with preschool director Vicky Luehmann and her husband Howie, and shared hugs and good wishes for a good start on Monday, Sept. 24. Vicky was very grateful for the overwhelming generosity of the Woodbury families. We'll have pictures of both groups next week.

We then joined a team of 12, from St. John Montgomery, Woodbury Lutheran and Crossroads Cottage Grove, in Stockton. The guys from Montgomery and a couple from Grace Lutheran sheetrocked the parsonage lower level. It's done -- not just the sheetrock hanging, but the taping and mudding, too. Others took down what was left of the fence in the backyard. And several of us from Woodbury, Montgomery and Grace Lutheran washed and sanded fellowship hall chairs that had been done the first weekend we were in Stockton after discovering most of them had water inside the legs and were beginning to rust. Ah, well, sometimes it's one step backward! We used as much Rustoleum as we could get our hands on in Winona, drilled holes in the bottoms of all of them and prayed they are almost like new.

The guys from Woodbury and Cottage Grove worked in Vi's shop and finished pulling the walls and cleaning out the old insulation. It's still a long way from being ready for rebuilding, but they made significant progress.

Best part of the day was having lunch with the people from the church (thanks to the women of Grace). God graced us with absolutely beautiful weather for al fresco dining, but looking at the tables on the church lawn and the change in the leaves reminded me we have a lot of work to do before the snow flies!

I had a couple of "off road adventures" checking out sites for the boys coming in Tuesday from Concordia Academy, who are going to clear the river banks and corn fields of debris. One was in Mark's 4x4, and we took a side trip to the top of a hill with a fabulous view of the valley (check out the pictures). The other was in our minivan as we followed a farmer on a corn field road which ended at a destroyed "crick crossing." Our minivan will never be the same and getting a coach bus full of boys in there would be more than a bit tricky. A funny visual, but not even remotely possible. We do have limitations on what we can help with!