Our church is about to start a building program, and we are just starting into the capital campaign for said program. Sunday was a day of meetings as Brad and I saw and heard first hand how the changes to our campus will affect us and our children. We were understandably excited and talked a lot with each other and the kids during the course of the day yesterday. We also came home with some very nice brochures, complete with artist’ renderings of our campus.
Samuel was very interested in everything that we talked about and asked a lot of questions. In fact, all three boys were interested, so we took the opportunity to talk to them about the gift we will be making as a family. Then tonight, we prayed through our special prayer card, a card which lists specific requests for each week of this capital campaign. We assigned each boy a topic from the card and tried to help them understand it well enough to pray for that request.
Samuel’s request was that “through our sacrificial gifts, we reach our goal of raising $130 million to build our new campus”. We asked Samuel just to pray that we would have enough money to build the new church. This is what he prayed:
Dear God, Thank you that our new church will cost a REALLY REALLY LOT of money. Like, you know those cases in No Deal or Deal with the million dollars! Amen.
Maybe we’ve watched a wee bit too much of the Game Show Network here recently.
Nevertheless, if you are interested in seeing what we’re about to do, click here or watch the video, below. It’s really pretty incredible.
Halloween offered a bit more excitement than we bargained for this year. As it was our first year in the new house, we were totally unprepared for the – how shall I say it? TOTAL LACK OF PARTICIPATION ON THE PART OF THE NEIGHBORS. In the old ‘hood, by the time the sun was starting to set, the littlest ghosts and goblins were already ringing our doorbell and by the time the big kids were coming around demanding candy, we were running out. And I always buy 3 huge bags of candy, so that’s a lot of kids!
In the new place, the neighborhood formerly known as Christie Ranch (not sure if the name is The Estates now or what), it was well after 7pm before a SINGLE KID ever rang the doorbell. And our 3 bags of candy? We maybe gave away one. Not that I’m upset, since I wisely purchased only my favorites! (Ahhhh 3 Musketeers bars, we meet again for our yearly rondevue!)
So when 7:15 rolled around, the doorbell rang and suddenly we found ourselves face to face with ALL the neighborhood kids – in one very large group! They were like a snowball rolling down the street, collecting kids as they went. Our kids got caught up in the snowball and Brad and I found ourselves racing around the house, locating flashlights, bags, keys – then I went running down the street behind them yelling “Wait! Wait!” while Brad stayed back to answer the door at the house.
Somewhere along the way, Matthew set down his gun. This is not your ordinary storm trooper gun, either. This was his $20 birthday present around which his entire costume was purchased built. So after trick-or-treating down both streets that make up the neighborhood formerly known as Christie Ranch, we realized Matthew was missing his gun.
At this point, we were ready to head over to Ryan and Jillian’s neighborhood since let’s face it, ours was dead. So we headed down Langdon, thinking we could spot the gun on someone’s front porch. In front of about the 3rd house stood four adults, drinking wine and eating Skittles. They said two kids had come by not long after we had and one of them had a white plastic gun that didn’t go with his nerd costume.
Brad knew just who they were talking about since they had come by our house too. They were older kids – one dressed like a gorilla and one like a nerd – and the nerd was talking on his cellphone when Brad answered the door and – no lie – said to the person on the other end of the line “Hold on, I need to get some candy. Trick or treat.”
So we were off like a shot, driving up and down streets, looking for a gorilla and a nerd. It took us about 10 minutes to find them, and when we asked if they had seen the gun, the nerd produced it immediately (which I appreciated since it was hidden in his HUGE candy sack). They could have lied, but how thankful we all were that they were honest, um, nerds and gorillas.
When we drove away, Peter told me that he had been praying for the return of Matthew’s gun, so we talked about how God was so gracious to give it back to Matthew after he left it on someone’s doorstep. In the end, I found it quite poignant that God provided us a moment to teach the kids about Him in the midst of the most pagan holiday of the year.
