Youth Retreat at T4C

We arrived at Freestone place on a cool, Friday afternoon going first to the T4C water meters, turning them on, going to the main building to turn on the gas and lighting the water heater. We turned on all of the downstairs heaters and lights, purged the sink and shower faucets of trapped air. With Dan Beutel and Abby Cooper's help we unloaded all of the new boxes of dishes into the kitchen, then left to go open our house and after supper at 7 settled in for Bible readings. Around 10:30 "My Favorite Martian" arrives with the very news I was dreading..."Did you know that we don't have any water down at the main building?" I thought, "OH, NO!!" Then I thought, "NO WAY. I personally turned ALL of the faucets on!" So I started trying to tell Mark he was wrong 'cause I saw the water pressure up and water flowing at a high speed. He wouldn't listen to me but kept insisting that we didn't have water. So to humor him I got on my coat, boots and gloves and headed out into the misting, 40 degree, darkness to verify his "suspicions." We nearly got his 4-wheel truck stuck in the muddy pasture in front of the single-wide due to my bad instructions to circumvent the gas pipeline but Mark managed to get us out and over to the entrance next to the 2 water meters which I'd visited about 9 hours ago. With flash lights we found a bubbling stream coming up from down under just about 3' from the meter on OUR side which meant that nobody else was going to come out and fix it. It was "OUR BABY!"

We gathered up teen boys, shovels, PVC, glue, intestinal fortitude, rubber boots, plastic, more intestinal fortitude and launched a campaign to dig up and repair the break. After the boys managed to dig the 3' deep hole in the stickiest, muddiest mess you can imagine, we all stood around looking at the break, hoping the other would show some initiative to belly-flop down on the plastic sheeting laid over the mud to become the man-of-the-hour. Bro. Mark became the brave soul who did so and after great effort managed to fix the break. We all dragged back to our respective beds at 12:30 AM from this "worst case scenario." The camp was online for fresh water once again. Showers, toilets, etc. were to be had once again.

The weekend was a wonderful success with about 35 in all attending.

Bro. Will Jackson led the studies in "The Teachings of Jesus."