Hidden Alleys.

[Imagine it's the weekend of Nov 4-6]

This weekend Nicole and I hosted a youth group. It was weird hosting after two months, but it was wonderful as well.

We were in two separate serving groups, and my serving group headed out to Ray of Hope on Saturday morning. Ray of Hope does a lot of neighborhood clean-up…restoration, even. Ray of Hope also does home repairs for those who can’t afford the high cost of structural home damage, but whenever groups go, we are typically helping clean up a neighborhood or making an abandoned lot look like an actual lot instead of a jungle.  Ray goes all over Philadelphia, cleaning the dirtiest places, the places people have given up on and just feel too overwhelmed to even consider cleaning.

Our project that morning? Tackling an alley.

If I had just been walking around this neighborhood, I never would have thought that what we cleaned up was an alley. It was about 3 feet wide and houses lined each side of it. Dogs barked at us as we walked back and removed thrash, fallen tree limbs, and several random objects. (Window pane, old fence posts, a shoe…)

I’ve done Ray of Hope in all sorts of weather…very cold, very rainy, very hot…been there, done it. It adds an extra amount of challenge to the work, just sticking with it and being positive sometimes. At the end of the morning or afternoon though, it is always wonderful to look back and see all the work you’ve done…the difference you’ve made in this neighborhood or this lot or this alley.

The weather we had that day was PERFECT alley cleaning weather. It was fab.

We finished that morning and the alley actually looked like an alley! It was incredible. As we collected all the tools and circled up to pray together, I thought about myself and those around me. Did we have “hidden alleys” within us, waiting to be cleaned up…restored? Maybe that’s silly of me, but I often find myself thinking of things like this, whether it’s a filthy alley or a shop-vac that makes me think of it. I thought about how I knew I definitely had hidden alleys at one point or another…places within me that I had given up on and just felt too overwhelmed with, and I remembered how God worked in me, cleaning out the lies and the insecurities and the doubt. How I’d even gone back behind Him and made the alleys dirty again. But He keeps coming back, cleaning it out. Restoring me.

He’s restoring you, too. May this be perfect “alley cleaning weather” for you, and for me.

With love,

Emily