God & Country 2007

Apologies for going so long without posting. We have been extremely busy, though, preparing for our 5th Annual God & Country Celebration. I posted about this event last year when we had 3,000 in attendance. We were bowled over by that number a year ago. Well, after lots of hours and hard work by many people in our church we had our G&C Celebration this last Sunday night. THERE WERE ABOUT 12,000 PEOPLE THERE!!! God has just blessed us so much with this event. We had great music, great food, helicopters, skydivers, inflatable games, comedy, an Iraqi War hero as a guest speaker, a monster truck, the biggest fireworks show around and loads more.

To put this in perspective of why this is such a miracle: 1) Our church averages about 160 in attendance. 2) The population of Lebanon is just over 12,000 people (30,000 in our county). Basically our tiny church put on an outreach event and pretty much the entire city descended on it. G&C truly is the talk of the town this week. Everybody loved it!

I finally was able to leave the event a little after midnight on Sunday night. I was driving home alone in the church van and just started weeping. I'm sure it was partly from exhaustion. But mostly I just kept seeing these images of our church people in their orange G&C tshirts working their tails off and truly serving this community. I was just overwhelmed both by the gift that our people gave this city (everything was free, except food), and by the gift that God gave us by allowing us to help him share the Gospel on a truly amazing night. Our pastor, Joe Wilson, said it best yesterday when he said, "Now I know how the little boy with the sack lunch felt when Jesus took his little bit of food and fed thousands with it."

Here's a link to the front page headline story that the Lebanon Daily Record did about G&C. It's a great article. I'll try to find some better pics to post later. I didn't have time to take many.