Sunday

We attended the worship service here on campus.  This was led by Pastor Keith, who we found out was related by marriage to the founder, Donna.  It really is a family affair here which comes as no surprise, when you learn that Donna, herself an adoptee, adopted something like 18 kids, a few of whom still live on campus.  Pastor Keith has also adopted more than a dozen, so you can say that many of these kids know each other very well.

The first Sunday of the month is more of an informal song service.  Nearly the entire service is spent singing the songs suggested by the audience, and Keith, with his guitar and good singing voice, knows them all.  Some songs I didn’t know, some were songs I haven’t sung in decades, such as ​I’ll Fly Away​, and others were more current.  All were accompanied by Jacob on the Tamborine and enthusiastic singing by some of the kids.

They held communion which was perhaps a bit less liturgical than I am used to, but it was good to join with them in the worship of our great God and King.

We went out for lunch with Steve and Sharon to Homedale, a nearby town, to the Breakfast Cafe, a little restaurant serving breakfast and lunch fare.  Run by a Hispanic family, everything had a Mexican flare to it.  I had an omelette with some sort of chipotle spices in it, it was really good.

We watched our own church service in the afternoon, so we got the praise portion in the morning and the teaching in the afternoon, for a complete package.

At 6pm we met with Steve and Sharon and a few people from Hope House and got an idea of some of the things we would be doing.  One of the residences, a double-wide mobile home, had a water heater in a closet that leaked so it was removed.  The drywall near the floor of that room was removed and the flooring was removed to mitigate mold and we will be fixing things back up and restoring the room to a usable state.

The women will start by putting down shelf and drawer liners in a new kitchen in one of the buildings. This all starts tomorrow.

I launched the drone this afternoon to get some aerial pictures of this place.  This was a former Job Corps campus.  The Job Corps built a new campus in Nampa and this campus sat abandoned for quite a while until it was purchased by Donna for the Hope House.  It took three years of renovations to get it to a usable state and, over the years, many SOWER groups have come in to do various projects, from remodeling projects to building a barn for the goats.  There really isn’t much around here that hasn’t been touched by SOWERs and it’s neat to hear everything that has been done over the years.