Outdoor Events in late October...Are you Crazy??

So this past Sunday afternoon Calvary Baptist had our "Harvest Festival" for kids and their parents in the Monte Vista area; for those of you who've never been to a "Harvest Festival" it's the churchy way to get around all the evil semantics of "Halloween Parties".  I've seen it pretty extreme where the only costumes allowed are those of Biblical characters (no demons or Lucifers, please) but we didn't go quite that far.

It was amazing.  The weather was perfect, no wind, close to 60 degrees as long as the sun wasn't behind clouds, and a great turn out of children from the community.  To tie in with the event, I had preached that Sunday morning on the idea of "preparing without planning".  I used an example from Reggie McNeal's This Present Future:  Six Tough Questions for the Church where McNeal talks about the difference between planning out what we're going to do for God versus preparing for what God is going to do and joining him in that work.  The Harvest Festival was a perfect illustration of McNeal's point:  we couldn't plan on good weather (if anything, planning for an outdoor event in late October in Colorado is probably not the smartest move to begin with) and we couldn't plan on anyone from the area showing up.  All that we could do was prepare...we could pray that God would allow the event to illustrate the love that Calvary has for Monte Vista; we could have mounds of candy ready to rot out the teeth of every kid within a 25 mile radius; we could have volunteers ready to keep grown-ups out of the bounce house (yes, I'm guilty), hot dogs on the grill, and smiles on every kid's face.

The simple truth is that for Followers of Jesus there is no need to plan...there is only the need to be prepared.  If this idea really sank in, we would feel the burden of the unplanned and the unfulfilled utterly disappear.  We would not pressure ourselves with a success matrix that weighs our accomplishments against our expectations but rather we would leave the results to God and simply live in obedience to Him.  

As a new pastor I feel some pressure to "make things happen"; I'm going to take my own advice this week and prepare for what God is going to do in this church without planning out how I think it should happen; I'm going to trust God and simply rest in the fact that He is large and in charge. 

I might even start getting ready for another late-October event next year...well, maybe I'll wait on that a little longer.