This is a much-overdue post about last Saturday’s outreach event on the Omaha Indian Reservation! There were lots of status updates about it leading up to the event, followed by not much afterward, which may have left some wondering what happened! Basically… the week got really busy, especially with preparing for preaching at church this Sunday. Finally have a little free time now.

First, if you were there and are reading this, I just want to thank everyone for the time they invested in this, both in preparation and last Saturday itself.

From my perspective, this really is a story of how many unlikely twists and turns there were along the way so that God could show all of us how it was His work, and not a result of careful planning. Most of these items were never communicated to the entire group, so you may not have known about some of this (until now).

===Early Stages===
To be honest, I wasn’t sure it would ever really materialize. Started as a VERY wild idea back in June… and took off. The necessary approval from various levels came very quickly and within days of first being thought of, it looked like a “go”. That’s not to say there wasn’t quite a bit of work involved (Cary Farrington can vouch for the number of emails per day that came about that first week!)

In early July, just after the schedule was thought to be finalized, we hit a roadblock with scheduling and had to make a quick change. After a stressful day of contacting everyone involved and announcing a change, I then found out that the original date we’d planned (8/8) coincided with the tribal powwow over in Macy. We wouldn’t have known about the powwow if not first having the need to explore a different date, and in all likelihood would have ended up just coming up on the 8th and finding hardly anyone around.

Later in July, one of the team members from GRC (Omaha) volunteered to organize a school supply drive. Our church group responded with some VERY generous donations. We had at least $50 worth of donated supplies, and maybe even over $100 worth, plus items such as Beanie Babies.

===Last Saturday===
Going into last Saturday, apart from a possible chance of rain, it looked like everything was moving along smoothly. Items were purchased, signs and flyers were prepared, everyone seemed to know their role… and then we all woke up to heavy rain Saturday morning. Don’t know about everyone else, but for me that was a HUGE stress item. On the road at 7:15 AM, visibility was down to well under a quarter mile and the wipers couldn’t even keep up.

But… should have known by that point… it was just one more thing to remind that God was the one in control, not any of us. The rain stopped by 8:45. While we had a light shower or two in Walthill, it was nothing like first thing that morning. And the sun even came out by late afternoon.

Some specific things that had been items for prayer last Saturday and the way they were answered:
-Continuation of existing connections there.
–Some of the people we saw were ones we recognized from all the way back to our first trip in 2007!

-That in the morning while handing out flyers to announce the event we would be joined by kids that recognized us from VBS, who would help us reach their friends.
–Kids came out, recognized us, went along with us as we walked through town, and showed us some of the houses to go to!

-Good turnout.
–We counted sixty-five people from the community in attendance in addition to our 15 on staff!

-That the community would be blessed by this.
–Multiple people from the community expressed their gratefulness. (And it sounds like they’d like to see this become a regular repeating event each August!)

Also, the school supplies that had been donated were all distributed less than 40 minutes after being put out. During the course of the afternoon, most of the Bibles and resources for kids that we also were offering for free were also taken by various people.

Finally, though God could have sent any number of people, it seems notable that we got 65 people from the community plus the 15 of us on staff. Why? Just as a wild guess we’d decided on having 80 servings of food for lunch. 65+15 = 80. I think that just goes to show once more that it was really all God’s work and all of us just got to see how everything fell into place… maybe even despite our efforts!

So thanks again for everyone’s help. Anything to add, feel free to comment!

When I receive the rest of the photos, and have time to sort through them, I’ll be creating an album with 60 photos to put on Facebook (in addition to the photo art which I’ve started to make with some of the pictures I have so far). For those who have requested photo discs, I should be able to get those done and in the mail at least by sometime next week.

It sounds like an article covering the event may have run in this week’s Thurston County newspaper. If I find out more about that, I’ll post it as a comment.

And… don’t forget we’ll be doing the regular week-long project next June, as well this one-day event maybe becoming regular as well! So mark your 2010 calendars.