When opposition accompanies sharing the Gospel

Our church has adopted a local park as a place to show the love of Jesus by giving away free stuff, serving food, praying with people and sharing the Gospel. We call it “Community Cares” and we plan for months in advance and ask God to show us how to reach the people of our community with his love.

Saturday we hosted an egg hunt, gave out donuts/muffins and shared the Gospel through resurrection eggs in small groups on the grass.

(Until my van dies I figure I might as well decorate it and use it for advertising. My husband won’t let me graffiti it with spray paint but how cool would that be? Like classy graffiti if there is such a thing.)

It was an incredibly awesome day and God was in that place but I will tell you it was not without a struggle.

The weather – was freezing!  The wind – flipped over two tents that couldn’t be put back up – the prayer/counseling tent. Not that prayer has to take place under a tent as seen here by the registration crew below. And not that freezing windy weather will keep people from showing up to an egg hunt. It just made it that much harder to set up. Still yet, people jumped in and served whole heartedly. 

  

Another set back came when we blew a fuse and couldn’t make coffee. But the crew worked it out by getting a generator. One of our food servers got light headed and ended up having to go to the ER. She’s okay thankfully.

The kids had plenty of eggs to hunt as we hid over 3,000 eggs and had around 125 kids. We had 200 “prize eggs” which was indicated by a slip of paper in the egg with a gold egg graphic. They turned that in later for a prize from the prize table. We also had a few dozen gift cards to give away as a raffle for the parents. So that was really fun.

After the egg hunt we gathered the kids in small groups of about 10 around the field. There were trained kids and adults sharing the resurrection eggs with their group.

I will never forget this fellow below coming up to me with sheer delight on his face as he said, “I am just so happy right now. I can’t explain it but I am just so happy.” I asked him why and he said, “Because I just shared my first Resurrection Egg Gospel story in my life and it just feels so good!” He worked with his teacher from last year to present the Gospel to their group. A few other kids had the same opportunity and it was just amazing to see them take it so seriously and to see the impact that sharing the Good News can have, not only on the people who receive it, but those who tell it!

There were about 10 groups of kids hearing the Gospel at the same time. Not all the kids stayed but many of them did and we were so thankful.

Honestly, I was a bit disappointed in how I handled my group. I felt scattered all morning long and was having a hard time keeping my thoughts together. I woke up that morning at 5am throwing up with a migraine. As soon as we got the park our daughter started a fever and was complaining of nausea. My head was throbbing and I was concerned about Sophie and torn between a million places. When I finally sat down to share the Gospel I was rather discombobulated. I uttered a prayer to God and said, “You gotta do this.” Our son, Mitchell, gave the Gospel story to our group and did a fantastic job. And I closed out our time with a recap of why we need Jesus and for anyone who wanted to stay after and talk more about believing in Jesus they could. I can only trust that God filled in the gaps. We committed this day to Him and so I have to leave it in his hands. I want to learn from my mistakes but also learn to leave it with Him and not overanalyze things.

At the end of the day we loved people, we served people and we shared the Good News with people. And that’s really what we’re here for. So yeah, it was a good day. We accomplished what we felt God called us to do. There were hiccups and chaos along the way but I’m convinced that sharing the Gospel won’t ever be all crisp and clean. It will be messy and haphazard at times. And our God is big enough to work through that.

We are all people who stand in need of Jesus. We all need reminding that He is our God who is Faithful, Merciful and our one and only Hope. And these people were worth pushing through the opposition.