Our first meeting...

This is from Mary Cecil little introduction to Willing Hands.

Welcome to all of you to Willing Hands Life Group. Bonnie, Katrina & I are very excited about this group and we hope you are too.
I am going to share a little about how this came about. Over the summer, Bonnie & I started getting together to make quilts. She and Evie would come and spend a chunk of the day and we had a lot of fun getting acquainted and working on projects together. We started talking about how wonderful it would be if we could create this same experience for others and have a creative group at church. We heard that Katrina was thinking a long the same lines so we decided to come together and just brain storm on creating this group. We came up with about 5 things we think that this group is about.
#1 - It's about building relationships with other women. Even though there is quite an age gap between Bonnie and I, I think we really gained something from spending time with each other. You might think that since I am the older one then I am the one mentoring Bonnie, but I hope I am humble enough to always be learning, even from someone younger than I am. We hope that even though we are meeting as a group that you can make a personal one on one connection with someone, even have times when you meet outside of this group.
#2 - We think it is the kind of life group you can bring a friend to that doesn't go to church and gently introduce them to church life. Many women want fellowship and creativity in their lives and would feel comfortable coming to this group.
#3 - There has been a long history of women using their creative talents to bless others and we envision working together as a team to make things to help others. An example of this was the fair this year they had a room set up where people could come and help make quilts. I think they made 140 quilts which they are donating to an organization that has summer camps for kids whose parents are in prison. They will be given away to those kids at camp. Many hands make light work. The ideas for this could be endless. One idea is if we have families that we are helping at Christmas this year then we could take a family and part of what we do is make things for that family.
#4 - We believe God is the creator and He created us in HIS image and likeness. Since we are created like Him we believe that characteristic of being creative is in all of us. It just needs to be discovered and built upon. We want to encourage women to tap into that creative part of them. I was 40 years old when I discovered what my creative nitch was. You are never to young or old to discover it.
#5 - We want our group to be spiritually inspiring. We think this can happen naturally as we visit and relate life's experiences with each other. We are going to have a very short time when we share an inspirational thing. Nothing too spiritually deep, but can touch the heart of anyone we might bring.


--again taken from Mary Cecil...stay tuned for more information from our first meeting!