Creation Celebration

In my last post on April 22(forever ago, I know. I know... I am slacking) I mentioned at the bottom of the post that The Beautiful Mess was having the first official service project in the Whiteaker neighborhood that night. Well, since it was Earth Day, we kind of unofficially named the project "The Beautiful Mess Earth Day Creation Celebration."
These are the posters(designed by Mr. Zach(Herb)Gideon) that were posted throughout the neighborhood to get the community talking and wondering who The Beautiful Mess is and to let them know what we were planning;

We met at 5:00 at the Eugene First Evangelical Church on Monroe and 8th on Sunday evening and broke up into teams to go into the community and clean up garbage, debris from the recent snow storm we had, old furniture, or anything else anyone in the area needed and wanted us to do. We then went on to invite them to dinner with one of these:

This was given to people we helped or just random people we met on the streets. We went back to the church to eat tacos/taco salads provided to us by a community group from The Shift Church in Albany, Oregon. 

There were a lot of good conversations and fellowship and all in all we had about 60+ people sign in at the registration table to join a clean up team. 

It was pretty awesome to see a community come together to serve and show the love of Jesus. Here are a couple of pictures... some taken by me and some not... of the evening.

And here is the sign up table crew(some of them):

Woo hoo! These guys did an awesome job setting this whole event up, and we were truly blessed at how the whole evening went and we look forward to doing the next project soon!
This coming Sunday... and every first Sunday of the month from here on(assuming it does well) we will be hosting an open mic night/coffee shop type deal and we hope to draw in people from the community to perform things like poems, art work, singing, telling a story or testimony... just whatever happens. We will serve coffee and desserts and hopefully get to have some really great conversations with people. Can't wait to see where God takes this crazy, Beautiful Mess.