A thankful Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving was a little different for Binh and I. Instead of the hours of football, family games, slow cooked turkey and cranberries, and lazy lounging-- we checked into the chaos of the command center at 8 Days of Hope- Nashville, a Christian mission, flood rebuilding project, with hundreds of other volunteers.

We spent three days and nights living in Christ Church in Nashville, and ate our Thanksgiving dinner surrounded by 800 others. This is the line for dinner that night:

And our very happy dinner table-- we had been working some long days by this point and we were grateful for the Thanksgiving meal provided to us that night.

Our days in Nashville looked something more like the following:

(clearly Binh and I know what we're doing in the below photo)

It was an incredible thing to be a part of something so much bigger than ourselves... to be just two in a body of hundreds making a mark on Nashville. It truly made me very thankful. And so cool to see the outpouring of support from businesses in and around the community-- from people and companies all over the country actually:

All sorts of supplies were donated for construction from everywhere:

And we worked with and were taught by awesome contractors who came to donate their extensive skills-- like Pete here (who was a very patient teacher).

Warehouses on one side of town were piled high with everything we'd need to help the devestated Nashville families- we'd simply pick up every morning.

Overall an incredible, put-life-in-perspective kind of experience, and so glad we went.