Day of Service

Our church has been planning a day of service for many months. Today just happens to be that day. We had several bales of clothing and lots of non perishable food shipped in from Salt Lake City that we set up and are distributing at the Greater Birmingham Ministries today. The timing couldn't be more perfect.
Also, we had planned on helping the city of Vestavia Hills parks department by cleaning up and placing pine straw (what they use here instead of bark) around trees and in flower beds, etc. Because of all the trees that came down in Vestavia in the Wednesday morning storm they asked us to instead go over to one of the elementary schools and work on cleaning up around the school, at the baseball fields, and the playground. We were only able to stay for a short time because Aiden had a soccer game at 9 am, but we were completely blown away by what we found.




Much of the city is in this sort of shape, but I took some pictures of what we saw just in Cahaba Heights. There are streets that have trees down in every single yard. On every single house. Smashed cars and houses everywhere. Downed power lines. All you can hear is chainsaws buzzing. It is like nothing I have ever seen before. It is hard to capture it with pictures taken from the window of a moving car, but I wanted to post some pictures anyway. Birmingham is such a heavily wooded area, there is just no escaping the trees when an angry storm like this blows in. (Most of these pictures were taken on the same street about a quarter of a mile long but I could have gone on and on. The entire subdivision of Cahaba Heights looks like this. Also important to note: the photos were mostly taken by Brooks whose eye level is below the window :) . ) We are feeling even more lucky this morning.