PRE- Spring Family Festival

This will be the first of two blogs about our Spring Family Festival.

As Easter approached this year our leadership prayed and sought God's face on what we should do to be a blessing to our community.  As we looked into possible ideas that sounded awesome, none of them panned out and we started growing discouraged.  One day I felt the Lord tell me that Easter was the best day to promote what was to come.

I heard the Lord say this as I was reading one of the books that has been inspiring to me. In one of the chapters I came across how a church back east through their town a Spring Family Festival.  As I read about it, the Lord whispered in my heart that this was what He was waiting to show me and why our Easter plans all fell through.  So our leadership team met and began to dialog about what we would want to do if we were going to do something like that here in the Palouse.  Amazing ideas came out through our brainstorming, like:

- making wind-chimes with recycled glass bottles and old silverware
- having a BBQ and along with serving the traditional hamburger and hotdogs, also serve Tri-tip           sandwiches
- having everything for people to make garden starts
- inflatables and coloring contest for kids
- AND EVERYTHING WOULD BE FREE!!

Soooo... On Easter I informed our church that we would be throwing a Spring Family Festival on April 29th.  Its a Sunday morning and its the 5th Sunday of April, which means we take church to the streets.  Not only would we be doing this on a Sunday but we are doing it during church hours from 11am-2pm, so we can target non church goers.  So Last week Anna shared more of the vision and specifics of what we wanted to do and told our group we don't have the money for this, but this is who God has called us to be and we believe He will provide it.  So we stopped right then and prayed and asked God to supply the money and everything we would need because we figure we will need $2000 for this to happen.  By 7pm that night I had a check in my pocket for $2000, funding the whole thing.  How cool is that.   The generous person who felt led to give the money said to me... "turns out that the money I have is not mine, it belongs to Him!! 

So praise God with us!!  He is God the provider.  Mark Batterson says in his book "The Circle Maker" that as a leader to never forget the phrase "vision beyond your resources".  That is exactly where this Spring Family Festival came from.  I knew God gave me the vision to do this, but we didn't have the resources until now... God just provided them! So Rejoice with us and pray that this event will be a time where our community gets spoiled in the name of Jesus!!  May we love our community the way God wants them to be loved. 

Thanks for taking a moment to celebrate with us!!  Blessing on you

Handicap Ramp CSO

WOW... I am excited about this!!  In late February we heard about a lady who was home bound because she is in a wheelchair and her home is not wheelchair accessible.  That didn't sit well with me and if I am honest with you, I didn't pray and ask God if we were supposed to build a ramp for her, I just volunteered our church to take on the project and believed that God would take care of the details.  It was one of those situations that I felt like it was better to ask for forgiveness then ask for permission.  After I committed to take on the project, we went and visited their place and saw they had made a make shift ramp(first picture above) and that sealed the deal for me, we had to do something.  While I was visiting some very close friends in the Treasure Valley, I shared about the opportunity and they said, "We want in!!"  So our Friends, The Kuhn's came up to sponsor and lead the project for us.  Michael (he is the one with the pencil in his mouth in the pictures above) is in the remodeling and restoration business, so this was right down his alley and he led our people in building the ramp.  Thank God for providing us with him and his family. 

While us adults were working on the ramp, our kids were at our house making doggie treats, cupcakes, and cards for the family and their three dogs.  How cool is it that our kids got to help bless their family and got to be apart of the whole experience.  If that were the end of the story, that would be an awesome story, but we had so many people show up on Saturday to help build that we ended up sending half of our crew into the Syringa Trailer Park Community Center and hauling 6 truck loads of garbage to the dump for them.  And still there is more, check out the rest of the story...

If you don't live here in the Palouse, you wouldn't know that we have been hit hard by a lot of rain, snow, sleet, hail, etc for the past several weeks and as you can see in the pictures above we are a muddy mess up here.  So I knew the possibilities of working out in the rain was real and when I started checking the weather for the Saturday we were supposed to build the ramp, it said 100% chance
 of rain.  I was nervous because the rain had been intense all week and I was afraid it was going to make building the ramp impossible.  As the leader, I talked a big game and told our people, "we will not be rained out, we don't just serve our community when it is convenient, etc", but inside I was a wreck because I was so afraid the rain would be too intense to work in.  Michael told me Thursday that he prayed and asked God to just give us good weather till 3pm on Saturday and he was confident that would happen.  We went to bed Friday night with hard rain but we awoke Saturday to partly blue skies and calm winds.  We were able to build the whole ramp without one drop of rain and at 2:55pm the first gust of wind hit us and by 3pm when we were driving away after finishing the ramp, the rains started and it became intense for the rest of the weekend.  God did not just provide us the opportunity, the man power, the finances, but He also gave us the perfect working conditions!!  How cool is our God right!?!  We truly have a God who cares for us!!

I want to thank all of you who came out and worked on Saturday.  I want to thank those of you who contributed financially to the project.  Thank you Kuhn Family for all of your involvement, support, and contribution!!  Thanks to Deb and Anna who worked with our kids and brought the workers lunch.  Thanks Syringa for letting us come into your community and show off God's love.

I can't wait for the next opportunity God gives us in our community because we have an All-Star cast here at Intersect!!  When the next opportunity arises, and it will, you will hear about it!!  God Bless