The day after Easter, which just so happens to also be my birthday, Easter that is, not the day after, anyway, the day after Easter I leave for Mexico with 20 or so High School students to camp out for the week and work each day building a small house for a family there.
The trip is always really a great time (check out last year’s video on YouTube) and I am really looking forward to it. But I am already really freakin’ tired.
I am actually looking forward to the manual labor this year. Most years in the past the thought of getting dirty, carrying heavy loads of dirt and wood, and stretching bailing wire made me cringe and want to hide out in my tent and hope they forgot that I came on the trip. Each day around lunch time, I would become very tired and start video taping everyone else (mainly because I was too tired to work anymore). I sat around and made fun of everyone, jokingly, and overall just avoided work. But this year feels different; I actually am looking forward to sweating and working hard.
Perhaps it is because I am becoming an old man… Ok so next week I turn 26… it’s not that old, but having a child automatically moves you up on the years chart. Or maybe it is just because I have been confined to the indoors so much these past 5 months taking care of Amalea (and sleeping when I wasn’t) – and I can’t wait to get out and work. Perhaps it has been the various jobs I have taken on in the last few years around the house; building the garden, the fire-pit, and doing most of the yard work. All of that gives manual labor a whole different feel for me – I feel like I can actually do it and enjoy it.
But as the title of this post proclaims… I am exhausted, already. We haven’t even packed the bus and my body hurts. We haven’t even spent the first night on the cold, hard, dirt and I am feeling drained. There is still food and equipment to be bought and packed, I still have to send out forms for goodness sake! I am praying the tiredness wears away in the next few days and God provides me with a burst of energy to carry me through the next two weeks.
