Last Saturday we had an opportunity to serve and be a very small part of something I think is pretty amazing. One of the couples in our church foundation group invited us to be a part of this project for a few hours, and although I don't know all the details and I'm sure I'm gonna butcher this, the gist of the story goes like this: a while back the city of Dallas busted a drug trafficker and confiscated 42 of his crack houses in and around the west side of the city. Habitat for Humanity purchased about half of the houses from the city and Builders of Hope (whom we were serving with) purchased the other half. Builders of Hope is renovating or tearing down & rebuilding each of these houses to create new affordable homes for deserving community members in those areas. Here's where it gets even better. Along with volunteers, much of the effort to make this happen is being performed by people that have been incarcerated previously but are now trying to turn their lives around. In fact, I heard of one guy who used to sell drugs in one of these houses making ~$40k/month years before who came to help tear down that same house as a symbol that he was putting his past to rest and moving on with his life. Can you imagine how cool that musta been? Here's the house we were working on this past Saturday. This is one of the few they were going to renovate (vs. tear down and start from scratch), so a whole group of guys and girls spent the morning tearing down all the sheetrock and pulling dry wall nails out of the interior framing.

Here's David, Brad and Ray. David and Ray (and their wives) are in the Foundation Group Kylie and I are part of. [NOTE: for the parents of these 3 gents that probably aren't reading this, but just in case... these guys were not part of the group that was previously incarcerated, at least no that I know of. Just wanted to clear that up in case you were thinking your sons had been keeping something from you all these years.]

Another cool texture from this site. This one is available for download for the first 42 people that click here and enter "skidmarks" for the password. BTW, the texture below along with the one that was on the blog as a temporary give away on Monday) were used to created the first image in this post.