Jesus Our Help

We’ll be in Florida the rest of January and February

There is a myth that “retirement” is leisurely. Either the myth is untrue or this isn’t really retirement. Since Gail and I returned in November from our last time in Florida we’ve been fully busy every day with the holidays, work at the Christmas tree farm, family visits and home (and camper) projects. See the previous post At-Home Update and January Plans for some of those details.

The last project we attempted was the biggest: replacing 800 square feet of rug and worn laminate in our home with luxury vinyl planking. This involved many time consuming steps: packing books, moving furniture, taking up the existing flooring, cleaning and preparing the concrete surface and then laying out underlayment and installing the flooring. Vinyl planking goes pretty fast once you’re up the learning curve, but still the last two steps took us a full week of sixteen hour days. It was tiring, and hard on the knees. Here are a few photos:

You may think that a project like this has nothing to do with Crisis Response, but that’s not entirely the case. Now that Gail and I have real, recent, hands-on experience with a vinyl planking project we will be prepared to help teams that are installing it in homes – and almost every home we work in ends up with vinyl plank. And after we finish the trim in our house (next time we’re home) we’ll be better prepared to help with trim in other homes. So everything works together to enable ministry.

The length of that project only managed to delay our return to Florida by one day. We leave tomorrow, January 11^th, and will be in Ft Myers by Saturday, ready to meet a new team on Sunday and begin working in homes on Monday. We’re really looking forward to catching up with our friends and investing in relationships for Jesus’ sake. Recently Gail and I have been talking about our discipling ministry with Crisis Response as facing in four directions: toward homeowners, toward teams, toward fellow staff and toward churches. Pray that God would enable us to be a blessing in each direction.

Thanks for praying for us as we pursue these goals. If you want to be on our frequent pray-ers team, just drop us an email, a text, or reply to this post. If you would like to support our ministry financially, visit Giving: Bob and Gail DeGray. All gifts are greatly appreciated.