"When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade"...so goes the old saying. The Apostle Paul put it like this in the book of Romans...
"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." (Romans 8:28)
Such was the case with this past weekend's Love Granbury Kindness Explosion. Not even an all day torrential downpour on Saturday could deter the Church from sharing God's love with the greater Granbury area! In fact, the rain only served to make most of our kindness projects even more powerful than they normally would have been! How's that for God working things out for the better?? :-)
So here's a run down on the weekend's events:
The Friday night worship service was nothing short of amazing. To kick things off, we had a skit called "John's Creed" that was written and performed by a drama group made up of students from a number of different student ministries. The skit illustrated - in a pretty humorous way I might add - our focal scripture found in 1 John 4:12.
Lincoln Wiseman and Carolin George led us in worship on Friday night, and as usual, were superb! Then, our special guest speaker for the evening, Dr. Al Tizon, brought a great message about the true meaning and importance of unity in the Body of Christ. We hope to have Dr. Tizon's message uploaded to the Love Granbury blog sometime later this week so that you can listen to it or download it if you would like.
Dr. Tizon then led us through a time of repentance and renewal as the altars were filled with God's people pouring out their hearts. It was truly an amazing sight! Suffice to say that the Church went out of the Acton Baptist sanctuary on Friday night challenged, fired up and ready to spread God's love on Saturday during the Kindness Explosion.
We know they must have been fired up because the rain that had started on Friday evening and that continued pretty much all night long and on into the morning hours didn't even slow down most of Saturday's kindness projects. The cookouts at the city park and the couple of car washes that had been planned were scrubbed...for obvious reasons...but everything else went forward as planned! And by the way, those cookouts at the park have been rescheduled for this Thursday evening (Granbury Church of Christ) and next Saturday morning/afternoon (Lakeside Baptist). So instead of Kindness Explosion weekend, we are having Kindness Explosion week!! Actually, we did have one group that held their cookout in spite of the rain, and they had a great day basically delivering their hot dogs and hamburgers right to the neighbor's doors!
By the time the 10:00am start of Kindness Explosion rolled around, it was pouring down rain by the bucket full. As I said, this only served to make the kindness projects even more powerful. The groups doing carry out at Walmart, Brookshires, Big Lots, and David's Supermarkets were very popular people as they were ready and on the spot to help shoppers get to their vehicles under the cover of huge umbrellas. Those same people were simply blown away when the Love Granbury people let them get in their vehicle while they loaded up their groceries!
Others helped out by drying off the shopping carts as they came back in from the parking lots so shoppers would have dry carts to use. Still others grabbed mops and started mopping up the wet floors at the store entrances. It was a phenomenal sight! In the time that I was there, I can't tell you how many times I heard the question, "why are y'all doing this?" What a great opportunity to explain to people exactly why we were doing this...to show them an example of God's free and unconditional love!!
Then we had others pumping gas for people at several self serve gas stations around town. People were pleasantly surprised when they were greeted by one of our Love Granbury folks who offered to not only pump their gas (not much use in washing the windshields though) but to take their money in and pay for them as well!
We had one group standing out in the rain handing out bottled water to people as they entered one of the local gated communities...we had two groups on the Square - one handing out brownies - and one handing out fresh cut flowers to passersby.
We had a number of groups that visited some of the local nursing homes delivering cookies, singing for the residents and painting finger nails and toe nails for the ladies. One group even adapted to the bad weather and went and cleaned a senior citizen's home.
One of our groups served those who serve us by baking cookies and taking them to the local police station, the Sheriff's Department, the hospital, and the local fire departments!
We had one group that had a gigantic free garage sale that had been advertised and promoted in it's Healthy Kid's neighborhoods and through some of the local food pantries. There were tons of people who got items they desperately needed. One family came in that had had to sell just about everything they owned, including all of their furniture, in order to pay their bills after the husband had lost his job. They were able to get their entire house re-furnished through the free garage sale!!
Finally, after all the kindness projects were completed, a bunch of soaked and soggy saints gathered back at Acton Baptist Church for lunch with food donated by a number of local eating establishments. After a great lunch, we all gathered back in the Acton Baptist sanctuary for our closing celebration service. We were led in worship by the Acton Baptist Student Praise Band and if you were there, you know how great they were! Actually, this group had already played for several hours down at the town square under the Granbury Plaza pavilion, so they played their hearts out Saturday!
We heard testimonies from each and every congregation about their kindness project(s) and how they saw God work through their servant efforts. There were some awesome testimonies!
All in all, it was a fabulous day!! So many seeds of God's love were planted all around the community this weekend.
A special thank you to Jason Turbeville, Pastor Glen Ward and all the wonderful folks at Acton Baptist for being such incredible hosts this year! You guys did an awesome job and were so very gracious!
Thanks to all of you for making Kindness Explosion 2010 a wonderful success!!
