volunteer stories
Volunteers Sharing the Experience
When God blesses newlife, we share it!
We’ve been on the mission with newlife for just over 3 years. We serve in a couple of areas and have been so blessed in doing so. Lance and our son Race are on the AM set up team. Our older boys, Wes and Zach also started out on the set up team, and have been involved in many areas as they’ve grown; music with the children’s program, videos during services, and more recently, with the youth group.
Lance and I also have our Wednesday night life group and these people are truly our church “family”. We pray for each other and have seen miracles. We’ve come to the place that we know God will answer us and wait on him expectantly. We love each other, laugh and cry together, help each other, move each other, and delight in each other’s cooking. We do life together.
Serving with newlife has brought our family closer together. Whatever we give, we get back 10 fold. We’ve made friends, gotten to know tons of people, and mostly our hearts have grown: for each other, for the Lord’s church, and for anyone he may put in our path.
For the last 5 years or so, my brother and sister-in-law have asked us to join them at newlife. We would go occasionally and loved it, but every time I went I would become overwhelmed with emotion and I could hardly fight the tears. It was crazy! I thought, what the heck is wrong with me? Well, after a rough year with my marriage and my daughter as a senior in high school, she finally just said, “mom, I want to go to church! I want us to get our life and priorities in order”. When she said that, I could hear the commitment and longing for a relationship with the Lord in her voice. I was both excited and nervous. I knew in my heart that the overwhelming need to burst into tears in church was the Spirit moving through me and Jesus pulling at my hearstrings, asking me to walk with him, not just come and visit. So we did it!
That was nearly two years ago, and within our first year our hearts completely changed. Most of the fighting, yelling, feelings of loneliness and emptiness were disappearing. Our hearts became so full and all we wanted to do was “get involved”. We saw trailers being filled with sleeping bags for the homeless last year and decided that we wanted to be a part of that. We hooked up with Team Jesus and helped serve meals in Seattle to the homeless whenever they went. But the most joyous time was when we went over there Christmas morning. If you ever want to shake the “ickyness” of all the gift buying and pressures of what Christmas has become, then join us there. We were so humbled.
My small group helped us fill ziplock bags of toiletries for the homeless women to provide them with special items that they would rarely get otherwise. Their faces lit up like little girls on Christmas morning. It was amazing. We used to never make eye contact with the homeless when we would go to Seattle, but now we do. We look at them lovingly because we see them as God sees them now.
Within our first year at newlife, we signed up to hand out programs once a month in order to serve and make friends. We take our turn every couple months stuffing the programs at home, and after the 6:30pm service that we attend, we take the containers of pens and programs back to the Hub since it’s on our way home. Serving keeps us in check. We serve because it’s what God did and it’s what God wants us to do. It’s part of our personal walk with Jesus. Just when we think that there might be time for us to slow down and take a breather, another opportunity presents itself to us to help others or help at church.
Our next big venture will take us to Africa in 2010. My daughter goes to school and works at a daycare part time and so going on a mission to help orphaned children just feels like something we are being called to do. Her ability to read to large groups of toddlers, hold their attention, play with them, and love them like she does at 19 years old, amazes me. We feel that God has been preparing us for something like this. We just want to continue to pay our blessings forward! I could go on and on because its just changed our lives in so many ways!