Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Busy Weekend of Ministry

Thursday through Saturday was the McLean County Fair. Our church hosted a booth in which we offered a free carnival ball toss game for kids. Members of the church put together a wonderful game board that received numerous compliments and made for an attractive booth display. I worked the booth on Thursday afternoon and Friday evening. Attendance at the fair seemed quite good this year as we had great weather and a legitimate carnival in town. At our booth kids tossed balls into three different holes in the game board. If in five tries they made one in each hole they could choose a prize, otherwise they received either a super bouncy ball or blowing bubbles.

One funny story: A 3-4 years-old girl who was showing some animals with her siblings kept coming up to the booth and asking "Watcha Doing?" When it was slow we let her play the game even though she'd already won a prize. Finally, her sister came by and said (I kid you not), "Sally, come on, time to go water pigs." Maybe it's because I'm a city boy but I find the phrase "water pigs" hilarious (by the way, it means give the pigs water to drink).

Then on Sunday our church hosted a "Worship-in-the-Park" and community BBQ event. Instead of our normal service we held our service outdoors at one of the parks in town and invited people to join us for the worship service and BBQ afterward. We had three families from the community join us and we had a beautiful day for this event. Please pray that we might be able to get these families plugged into the church. And we had tons of good food!

And yesterday I was planning on spending a relaxing day at home but instead got roped into helping one of the ranchers in our church put in new fence. He had me start by tromping through a field swinging a measuring tool the size of half a rod (8' 3") marking off distances. Then I drove the ATV while Dan dug holes with a post hole digger on the back of a tractor. We through some old railroad ties on the back of his pick-up and stuck them in the holes for posts. The hard part was tamping down the ground in the holes using an old drive shaft. Fortunately after the first two, a storm system came through and so that ended our work for the day.

My wife's parents are coming into town this weekend and after the service on Sunday we'll be heading down to the Black Hills in South Dakota for vacation. Then a week from Sunday (God willing) my wife and I will be able to pick up our goldendoodle puppy north of Minot!

By God's Grace, Jeff

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