Restoration Ministries

Hi! It's Rachel here and I want to tell you about the awesome ministry we got to work with for the past four days. We showed up at Trinity College on Sunday afternoon and after finding our rooms, dinner, and all that stuff, we headed down to worship with all of the other YG's working on the Chicago project. We worshiped, listened to a talk about the week's theme of "just be," and got our assignment for the week. Our YG would be working with Restoration Ministries. Restoration Ministries has many programs throughout the Chicagoland area including the Harvey House(a home for men recovering from various addictions), the Tabitha House(a similar type of home for women), a thrift store, and art building where kids come to learn arts from boxing to pottery. We mainly worked in the

Harvey

House. We cleaned the main worship/hangout room, organized classrooms for the after-school program, and took inventory of the canned food in the House's pantry(there were about 1500 cans of green beans). On wednesday most of the group stayed at the Harvey House to help re-finish the gym floor and sort moldy carrots while some others of us (including me) went to there art/boxing gallery to clean toilets, dust trophies, wash windows, sweep and mop floors, and clean drinking fountains. We met a few of the men living in the Harvey House including Dan who the "main guy who told us what to do everyday." Many of the men living in the Harvey house use talents they've learned in previous experiences (whether that be learning chess in jail or being a professional re-modeler) to make the house not only a comfortable place to live but also a safe place where kids can come to hang out after school. Most of what we did was pretty "behind the scenes" sort of stuff. But in Wednesday, Tanya, the woman in charge of all the kid's programs at the Harvey House invited the kids in the neighborhood to come hang out with us. We played color tag, soccer, and I got many bruises from throwing a football... I think it would help if I could catch better:) In our soccer game we played YG against kids; they beat us 9-7! It was really fun to see the kids all playing with each other and some of the men from the Harvey House joined in the game too... On their side:)