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