Radiate: Tristan Mason’s blog

The cabin is good to go! We inaugurated it last night with a bonfire and skewered hot dogs. We all feel like old guys groaning about our backs hurting, but a few muscle aches is well worth it. That cabin is going to be a great place for people to spend time pursuing God, away from the busyness and rush of everyday life.

So here’s the transport video…

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Well, the cabin is on the trailer. THAT was hairy. The video makes it look kind of easy because I couldn’t film while we were trying not to die. Okay, it wasn’t quite that bad, but what you don’t see on the video is that we had to turn the cabin after we got it on the trailer so that it would be in line with the trailer instead of perpendicular to it. So we jacked it up again, blocked it again, backed it under as much as we could, lowered it, drilled through some floor joists, ran tow straps through the joists, winched it further onto the trailer with a comealong, built a frame around it, and then strapped the frame to the trailer so the cabin wouldn’t move. Tomorrow morning the moment of truth will come when we move it…

Anyway, here’s the video.

[I was blinded this morning while sitting on this couch, and I saw]

You dwell in unapproachable light,
    and all the forces of night
    flee blindly from Your fiery gaze;

Yet the darkest soul of us all
    (left in tatters by the Fall)
    sees healing in Your gentle grace.

Another big project Ben wants to accomplish this week is cleaning out, bracing, and moving a small cabin to a secluded location as a solitude & silence retreat.  The cabin (a.k.a. “The Fortress of Solitude”) needs to be lifted, dragged onto a trailer, and hauled about 1.5 mi to a nearby farm.  This morning we disconnected all the wiring from it, removed unnecessary hardware, cleaned it, and started reinforcing it for the move so it won’t lose structural integrity (i.e., fall apart!) on the journey. The 2×4’s cross-bracing the walls and the chains forming an X should help prevent things from going too far out of square.

One of the main projects we want to accomplish this week is making training video’s for ABC’s volunteers.  Ben’s master plan is to upload the videos to Youtube so that volunteers can watch the training videos online before they arrive.  There’s also an intro video that helps churches and teams know the different ways they can help.

We’re all done the taping, so now it’s on to the editing process!