Friday (July 19th)
Today was a very bittersweet day. It is our last day working at Hope in the Manna Room, and our last day at the Neighborhood Bible Clubs. So our last morning, we hopped up out of our sleeping bags to go spend some time with Karen one last morning. Dave, Jed & I have really enjoying getting up and working with him every morning. I think the early morning exercise, serving, music and laughs has been the perfect way to start every morning and I will definitely miss it. After finishing up our work, we had to snap a quick picture with Karen.
We headed upstairs for bible reading but not breakfast this morning. We had other plans for a breakfast in the city after bible reading. We were excited to join Lenny and the others but were also antsy to get on our way since the schedule was so tight this morning. But it seemed that God had other plans for us. Instead of our 30 min bible reading, this morning it went for an hour. It was really good and Lenny had a lot of great things to share. As we rushed off to hope in our vehicles, we realized what a good thing it was that Lenny had kept us late. When we were leaving the church, we noticed a few police cars (lights on) and a helicopter circling. Having stayed in the area for a week, none of this really surprised us until we found out that it was because of the Manna Room that it was all happening. Unbeknownst to us, while we were all upstairs, someone came into the Manna Room, grabbed a knife and started threatening people. He attempted to take things but the guys volunteering that day & the guys that live there called the police, cornered the guy and wouldn't let him leave until the police got there. How crazy is that! And if we would have left 30 minutes earlier we would have been right in the middle of it.
As we all tried to put the pieces together of the early morning, we all hopped in vehicles to head down to the Farmers Market. We always enjoy going here for breakfast and just to walk around.
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| Scott got his donut! |
After a really quick breakfast, we headed off to The Getty. The Getty is so much fun. It is such a great place for views of the city, they have museums and beautiful gardens. We all had about an hour before the Neighborhood Bible Club team had to head to there last day with the kids. It was very unfortunate that we got such a small window of time, you could spend days at the Getty and still not get it all. But we were all excited to be able to at least get a little time.
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| Annie & the kids stopped by to say hi |
There was a small group of people that didn't get more then 15 minutes at the museum because they had a meeting with Kate. She works with an organization called Cherish that helps get ladies out of sex trafficking. Jed was able to attend the talk and the feed back from everyone that heard it was truly amazing what they heard and what is being done to help.
When the Neighborhood Bible Club left the rest of us had time to go back to explore but we were all really wanting to go back to help at the Manna Room for the 4pm meal instead. So we hurried back to Hope to hang out with everyone and cook one last meal with Jason and the gang. We were all so excited and happy to have one last chance to do this before we all headed home.
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| Chris |
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| Jeff |
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| Ray |
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| Awesome food list |
Once we finished cooking, serving, hang out with people, and cleaning up, most of us lingered around meeting, talking and saying a few good byes before we went to get cleaned up and head out for our evening excursion, Santa Monica Pier & 3rd Street Promenade.
We all had a great time hanging out, walking around, and being silly for the evening. We had a lot of friends from LA join us. We had dinner with Shalom, Eric, Audrey & Dave and when we got to Thai Dishes, Tim, Wendy, Soccer Matt & Amy were there having dinner too.
After dinner, we met up with the team again and decided who was leaving and who was staying. But right before we all left, Eric got a great group picture of everyone.
The group of us that stayed late just walked around for a while. There were many hilarious things that happened and were said but only one was documented in picture that I have to share. We walked by a book store and saw this:
Katie couldn't help but take a picture. Many in the group didn't get to see it but it was hilarious telling everyone what the title of the book was and how they thought the cover of the book would look before seeing the actual picture. So funny.
After walking for a while we all decided to find a coffee shop to hang out. Not much was still opened that late but we were able to find, Interactive Cafe. It wasn't great but it was exactly what we were looking for.
We hated for the day to end but we knew that we had one more full day to explore before it was time for the team to head home.
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