The beach clean up

It certainly didn't go as we had hoped for. The objective was to get the homeless involved and make a differance towards something positive.

When we pulled up to park, we notice a large group waiting exactly where we'd planned. Amanda and I both felt excited to see such a great turn out, but once we walked up and asked who wanted rubber gloves... out came the excuses. In short, 2 of the 20 something people ended up helping our small team of volunteers clean up the area.

I like to give credit where credit is due, so thank you to Lisa, Ruben, James, Amanda, Ron, and Chris. I'm also thankful for the generous donation provided by Papa John's Pizza. I'd coordinated to have lunch provided for all volunteers when we finished the clean up, as a special blessing for their good works. I chose to not give advance notice of this, particularly because I wanted those with pure motives to partake. Needless to say, we had an abundance of left overs.

At first, I felt defeated and disappointed... but then I looked at things differantly. I felt good about what I had just done. I've never in my life done a beach clean up, nor have I ever in my life picked up cigarette butts before. When we were finished, we'd collected enough trash from the 3 blocks, to fill 4.5 large garbage bags.