An Image And A Smile

We are praising God for a GREAT day Saturday at the New Albany Oktoberfest. God opened a door for us to have a booth at this event where several thousand people enjoyed almost 90 degree heat (enjoyed is a bit of a stretch for me!), great food, college football games on an enormous screen, games for children, and other vendors. This was our first ever ClearView Church festival booth...and I hope there will be many more to come. We met hundreds of people, gave out over 750 balloons, painted hundreds of faces, and were able to get hundreds of names/addresses with our free iPod Shuffle raffle. It was so cool to see the whole venue area filled with red ClearView balloons!

There were multiple God-victories to be excited about yesterday:

We accomplished our objective. Stated simply, we wanted to begin to seed ClearView in the minds of the people of New Albany and associate that image with a smile. One man even commented to me, after a great conversation, that "kindness will go a long way." Pray with us that a logo on a balloon, banner, or t-shirt will stick in people's minds and that when they see further advertising in future months, they might think, "Hey...I want to check that out...those people were great..."

God provided plenty of help. I was so thankful for our team. Each person that has been regularly attending our weekly gatherings were there with their families and all worked the whole 5-6 hours of the event. In addition to that, a couple I married earlier in the year helped for a few hours and two families from our ABF at Northwest Chapel drove over a half hour each way to work several hours painting faces and blowing up balloons. I was very concerned when we jumped into this opportunity (less than two weeks ago) that staffing our booth would be tough. But, thanks be to God, our team and friends came through BIG.

We were able to further conversations with several existing contacts, and have some good conversations with 4 or 5 families that might be interested in checking out what we're about. Pray that some team members would develop out of the conversations we had at Oktoberfest.

The most exciting thing for me was to observe our team and friends working cohesively, with great excitement for our mission. Several remarked how exciting it was to be out where people are, serving with love, and working together to make a difference for Jesus. I think serving at Oktoberfest expanded the missional horizons of our team...and we all want there to be much more community involvement and contact making to come as we build the history of ClearView together.

Thanks, God! And, thank you for praying with us for Kingdom impact to come from Oktoberfest.