And Then Came The Rain

Friday morning had to be one of the most beautiful Northwest mornings I've ever seen. The sky had incredible shades of blue swirled with the striking yet soft pinks you only see at dawn, then skillfully accented with wispy white clouds. Spectacular!

The day turned out to be significantly cooler with a breeze, and then today came the rain.

Gary was up quite early for a Saturday and surprised to see it had rained so hard the water had backed up out of the drains on to the driveway. We actually had several drenching rains.

It was set up day at the fairgrounds, so Brandon, Greta and Gary made several trips with trailers to bring the booth and get it all set up. Thankfully they were able to work between the outbursts of rain for the most part.

A great addition to this years set up is having a refrigerated trailer on site. There are several advantages:

• Brandon can make all his mix before the fair begins and now store it on site, so there will be no more early morning mixing sessions at the end of already way too long day.
• restocking can happen all day and be done by our runners which will also make evenings end much earlier.
• we will no longer be inconveniencing Dutch Mothers by taking up their refrigerator space.
• we can also stock other important product like our butter, small cartons of milk....and my Diet Coke.

Have I mentioned that we're not able to carry Coke products this year. How dreadful is that??

We decided to do church tonite. Our new youth pastor Brian co-taught with Pastor Grant. Their message was from Matthew where Jesus calls His disciples - 12 ordinary, unqualified men who, after following Christ, were never the same again. God calls us out of our past and into a transformed future radically changed by Christ.

They both shared a great burden for the youth in our community - fourteen thousand middle and high school students, many desperately aching for Christ. Satan is throwing everything he has at them, while many believers sit on the sidelines disengaged. Their challenge - it's time to engage in this mission of Christ.

Brandon, Greta, Dan and Courtney were at church as well. This was Courtney's first time at this CTK and it was fun for me to hear his reaction. I think he'll be back.

Brandon gave us a lock for the cooler at the fairgrounds, and we also stopped at the office to grab a tarp for the roof which doesn't appear to be waterproof. The ground there is now saturated and getting torn up by vehicles moving in to set up. This is going to be a mess if it doesn't dry out a bit before Monday.

It rained so hard that by the time we got to the booth the canopy was hanging full of water. Gary had to carefully push all the water up and out of the pockets that had developed. Not sure it would have made it thru the nite if there was much more rain. We were barely home when it poured again. So glad we went there.

Taryn and I are both posting on our blogs and listening to a James MacDonald triple header - a great three part series called Bending My Knee. So good! I keep jotting notes as I post.

I'm thinkin' a little 24 tonite! Season 3 "The following takes place between 6 pm and 7 pm".....