Challenge to serve

Jimmy Stroup

When the leaders at the Soul Survivor Christian summer camp in June

challenged their charges to action and service, Josh Bupp, 15, and

D.J. Acosta, 16, took the message to heart and decided to begin right

in their own backyard.

The Costa Mesa Senior Center on 19th St. is one of the locations

where ROCKharbor Community Church, of which Acosta and Bupp are

members, holds its services. Behind the center is the 600 block of

Plumer Street, a quiet neighborhood that has mostly single-story,

multi-family apartment buildings and the occasional house.

In honor of Serve Day, a community outreach program, Acosta and

Bupp cleaned up and down Plumer Street last Saturday. The teens

organized and orchestrated 25 people to help clean gutters, pull

weeds, sweep sidewalks and clear brush for anybody on the street who

wanted the help.

“We came a week before and knocked on all the doors and asked if

they wanted anything specific done,” Acosta said.

Acosta, a soon-to-be junior at Esperanza High School in Yorba

Linda, and Bupp, a new sophomore at Newport Harbor, led the volunteer

team and said they enjoyed it.

“I was nervous planning it, but it all fell together really well,”

Bupp said.

Acosta echoed Bupp’s sentiments.

“Once we started to do something, and everybody realized it was

just to clean the whole street, we had fun doing it,” Acosta said.

Mike Kenyon, the outreach pastor at ROCKharbor, isn’t new to

volunteering, but he said even he was impressed at dedication and

tenacity of Bupp and Acosta and their determination to see the Plumer

Street clean-up project through.

“I have found few people who have the combination of desire and

the ability of actually mobilizing people to serve,” he wrote in an

e-mail. “Josh and D.J. did an outstanding job.”

Humble to the end, however, the young men turn that kind of praise

around and said that the service was what was really important.

“The reward you get out of it is sharing God’s love with other

people,” Acosta said. “It’s a good feeling.”