Church Planting & Building a Play Set

For Christmas my wife and I had a great idea: "let's build the kids a swing set and fort." The excitement was building when our neighbors decided they too would build their kids a play set. So we were off to spend dozens of hours online and visiting hardware stores, pricing kits and lumber. We were extremely discouraged that our dreams and visions were way out of our price range. When we were just about to either give up or fork out a bunch of cash we didn't have God stepped in, through our neighbors, and we found the perfect one at 75% off! Step two was hiding it from the kids for three weeks before Christmas. My buddy Rob hid the slide in his storage facility and I threw a couple of tarps over the extremely large boxes in our garage. Fortunately, Natalie (4) and Becca (2) are clueless when it comes to things like large boxes in the garage. They never even thought anything when Daddy sanded and stained the wood for 2 days. It wasn't until we started building it 3 days before Christmas that Natalie began to suspect something was up.

It took the better part of two days to complete the project. My father-in-law, my friend Brant and I tackled the project with vigor and enthusiasm, but with less than satisfactory plans. We had to start over after putting up the first two walls because the plans failed to mention which way the posts were to be placed. We had left over lumber because the plans failed to mention the proper spacing for the floors and walls. And we had lots of left over parts, which is always scary when the safety of your family is at stake. None-the-less, we completed the project 2 days before Christmas. The kids love it and it is build rock solid. The only problem is: we are having the biggest rain storm to hit California in decades, so they haven't had much opportunity to play.

How does this relate to church planting? Well my plans for what are and what will be are mostly faulty. We often envision things turning out much different than we actually experience. Take our Christmas party/gathering for instance. We had invited lots of friends and neighbors, and for a change they all said they would be there. We were so excited! But as it turned out, most everyone was detained for various reasons and purposes out of our control. Isn't that always the way it is? But God...isn't that a great phrase? But God had other plans for us.

We took the party on the road to bless a family who desperately needed some holiday cheer! God blessed us through the encounter and we are praying that more and better blessings are coming soon. We started out a bit frutstrated at "having to start over, after building two walls," but in the end the results were better than we could have "planned" on our own.

Now we are just praying for some better "weather" so that we can play as God intends for us to play!