Once Upon A Lemonade Stand: Stirred, but not shaken

So, I don't think I mentioned yet that my family is on a new life adventure called church planting. In a nutshell, we picked up our lives & relocated cross country with a group of amazing people to help start a new church. We hold services in a movie theater and also lease an large office space for meetings, etc.

So today, about 30 minutes before service was about to begin, the power went out in the movie theater. We waited a whole 10 minutes before officially deciding to move the service to our office space. (If I had actually taken a picture of the amount of stuff we move each Sunday, you'd more fully understand this slight dilemma). We scrambled as quickly and gracefully as we could to haul children, exersaucers, sound equipment, coffee, etc. down the block to the office for service. We set up extra chairs, a nursery room and an area for big kids (by the restroom sitting area). When it was all said and done, by around 10:30 we had about 75 people crammed into the "large room" for service.

This my folks, is the reality of church planting. Actually, in my opinion I think we did a very fine last minute job of trying to carry out service as usually. And yes, we had worship music too. AND, despite all the craziness, I think we are still very blessed. Many things came to mind that I felt thankful for during and after (what I will call) the "service shuffle".

1) That we have a very large, versatile office space only 1/2 block from the movie theater
2) People wanted to hear about Jesus regardless of where we held service
3) Church attenders having flexibility, patience, & grace for the craziness (actually only those who came early got to see the "shuffle"!)
4) Had a cold, but sunny day. Thank goodness for no snow or ice
5) A large number of church attenders helping carry items from the theater to the office (I saw people I didn't know carrying things up the office steps)
6) Having a large number of chairs (that was actually sent by mistake- or was it...)
7) God equipping and preparing us to smoothly handle a situation like this

This small experience today stirred up my faith, gave me strength, encouragement, and also gratefulness for those around me. I also felt re energized. You would have thought that it was a crazy Sunday, but actually felt far from it. God is good. Maybe Jesus stirred up some others today too.

Here are a few pics to give you an idea of what service looked like at the office space. Of course these pictures are an afterthought. Being involved in the shuffle and frantically moving things around with a toddler in tow I did not think to shoot many pics.