"We're better together"

Today (Saturday the 4th) we had Ora and Labora, which basically means “pray and work”. We have two groups of students (one college aged and one high school aged) from Koln, Germany here visiting and these special Ora and Labora days are when we invite the people staying here to work with us around the monastery in the morning and then they are invited to pray with the monks. They are fun days because each of us volunteers is given a group and we lead them in a certain job. The group I led today (about 8 people) cleared rocks off a path and raked up a lot of leaves, etc. Boring stuff, very mindless work but to brighten the mood I brought my iPod with speakers along. Of the 40-some people about 5 are guys. I created a play list in about 5 minutes after breakfast that I thought girls would like-and assuming God would answer my prayers. I only had one German singing song on my iTunes but tons of “girl music”. Don’t ask me why I have the “girly” songs on my iTunes, I think they were on there when I bought it and I can’t seem to erase them or something like that. They loved it and the work was fun because we were all laughing about the music and me speaking German (I said since I was outnumbered I had better speak German). I let them play with the puppies for 15 minutes and all the girls went nuts, it was catnip. From the sounds of all the other Tabgha volunteers my morning work group was one of the best (boooyah!) maybe only second to cleaning the pool. Best moment: all of the Germans belting out the refrain to Don McLean’s American Pie, yeah you can say it, “Mike you da man!”

I like these chances when I am able to interact with the people here. It gives me a little more satisfaction in seeing myself accomplish something when I have other people around rather than the times when I just do work (the lights for example) and then the project is done. No one is directly affected by the lights whereas the people of this group also felt like they contributed too.