I have been very blessed to get to see some amazing things.  Sometimes they are just in my head and a lot of times they come out of my head and into our human existence.

Over ten years ago, God gave me an idea to do things differently.  Back then all of the churches used to have “Fall Festivals” and sell hot dog plates.  The idea that God gave me was really simple and I did not think all that special.  It just made sense.  The idea was for the church to share His love by giving to the community.  I mean we are supposed to be ministering to those around us by sharing His love and grace.

On Halloween night people are interested in candy and lots of it, so I shared a vision with my church family that we host an event where we give out candy, hotdogs and prizes – all for free.  We hosted out first event in the front parking lot of the church, where we would one day build a brand new worship center.

Can you guess what happened?  A lot of folks showed up and we had a blast sharing with them.  The other thing that happened was we started a trend.  Other churches stopped selling hotdog plates and started giving them away.

For over ten years we hosted this event and watched it grow each year.  It became one of the favorite ministries of our church family.  It always took a lot of work, but was worth all the work, because it was also a lot of fun and we knew that we were planting seeds of grace into the lives of others.

Several times through the years, I commented to some of my friends that I would love to have an event like this in partnership with someone like Wal-Mart.  A few months ago, I began to seriously pray about that idea and eventually went to the leadership at Wal-Mart with a presentation of an idea about how we could partner together to reach out and give back to our community.

They seemed to be interested in the idea and encouraged me to come back and talk some more about it.  When I went back for the follow-up, they said:  Let’s do this and we went to work on how to pull it off.  This past week, when I went back for the final walk through, I knew it was going to be pretty exciting.

Thanks to Wal-Mart and a great group of volunteers from Grace Place, we were able to see another vision become reality and the result was a whole lot of people in the community that got to be touched and encouraged in a very special way.

I just want to close off this blog by saying thank you to our Creator for giving us dreams and vision to see those dream become reality.  Thank you to my church family /friends now and through the years that have always allowed me space to dream and then given me encouragement and support to help make the dreams reality.  Thank you to people and businesses in our community that believe in partnership and care about the people who live around them.

We live in a great place and if we will continue to work and grow together, it will become even greater!  God Bless & Press On!