It was a Beautiful Day!

The  Bonny Doon Church's volunteer workday last month that I helped to lead, was incredible to witness.  Over 60 people from the community and people from roughy a half a dozen churches (such as Westgate and Vintage Faith) came together to help six properties and their families who that lost homes in the CZU Lightening Complex fires.  These families are under-insured, widows, single parents, or battling serious health challenges.

Despite the outrageous weather we've been having the past couple of weeks or so and the atmospheric rivers we had about a month before our workday.  The actual volunteer workday was blessed by perfect weather, warm days and cloudless blue sky.  It was truly a Beautiful Day!

Below is a photo of one of the properties we worked on, blanketed with snow.  Bonny Doon receives snow once in awhile, but we rarely see snow like what we've received this past week.  

The photos below show the property before and after the workday before the snows hit.  It took a lot of volunteer labor to clear all that brush.

Our mission team and participating churches was extremely excited to witness the encouragement these workdays gave to home owners and the joy volunteers experienced making a difference in the lives of fire survivors. 

We want to do it again and hope that you'll join us in making another workday possible.  We will continue  to raise funds so that we can continue to fund professional tree removal of trees endangering future homesites or pay for other underfunded aspects of a homeowner's rebuild process.   We invite you to  partner with us financially to help our neighbors.

       

I want to share with you the backstory that made this workday possible and thank the people on the leadership team.  This workday came about because of the tireless efforts and compassion of my dear friends, Denby Adamson, Julie Cahill and Patti Guard.  Although I have played a leadership and administrative role from here in Reno, without their commitment over the past year and a half, this couldn't have happened.  Denby and Julie met with the home owners we wanted to help to find out what we could do to bless them.  The projects that were planned for each home owner was unique.  For several homes we helped clear their land removing trees endangering their future property sites.  For others, we helped them restore their lands by helping them rebuild gardens that were decimated by the fires.    Patti reached out to the Santa Cruz Volunteer Center and other organizations to recruit volunteers, encouraged us to rally our site leaders for projects early and gave us encouragement and wisdom from having served on many Beautiful Day projects in San Jose over the years.

It was journey of faith pursuing this year's workday.  When we first began planning it, at the beginning of 2022, our ministry team (Julie, Denby and I) reached out to Santa Cruz Convergence, because they had lead the Beautiful Day workday in August of 2021;  they'd also indicated interest in continuing the days of service ongoing into the future. However, due to changes in their own organization, their pastoral team shared with us that they didn't have the human resources to lead another workday.   They promised that they would support us financially.  

We weren't sure where to go from there.   The Beautiful Day affiliate agreement that had blanketed our efforts in 2021 with insurance had been with Santa Cruz Convergence.  Our ministry team wasn't sure if our tiny Bonny Doon Church would feel confident in pursuing this project on their own.   Denby reached out to our church's governing board. I prayed fervently for our church to have this confidence.  When  in July of 2022, our pastor, Edd Breeden signed the affiliate agreement with Beautiful Day, I was confident that the Lord was behind this project.

Our team, then began working together to find a date that would work for our partner churches such as Twin Lakes.  Once we had a date, Julie and Denby then began following up with fire survivors to determine what type of projects would bless them.  With a date and a list of families we wanted to help, we began recruiting site leaders to lead projects.   Just as we'd completed our list of site leaders and began requesting Beautiful Day's team to setup the volunteer registration signup on their site, we discovered our affiliate agreement was no longer in effect due to structural changes in the Beautiful Day nonprofit starting in 2023.  This meant we didn't have insurance coverage for our projects.  Our team decided to continue moving forward though, all believing the Lord was behind our efforts to help our neighbors. 

The elders and pastors at Westgate Church did everything they could to support the workday, sharing the volunteer opportunity with other churches as well as with their own church, personally volunteering and making all the tools in the Beautiful Day shed available for us to borrow.

Just days before the workdays were scheduled to occur, our pastor, Edd, was able to confirm that we had insurance for the workdays through our own church's insurance. I literally cried with relief.