Other Weekend Thoughts - Gilbert Thurston

What a busy…but great weekend!

Friday night we had a bunch of the CAYA group over for games and a movie.

Saturday morning at 5am I got up to head over to the church to pick-up stuff for Applefest in downtown C’burg.

By a little after 6 we were packed up and ready to head downtown to set-up.

As you can see from the pic, our booth went from blue tent to just beyond the far blue tent.

We had games, balloons, music, videos, a place for people to drop off prayer requests, sign-up for free giveaways, pick up info about the church and mostly importantly…FREE popcorn.

We had specifically mentioned that we need power for our booth and were told it wouldn’t be a problem.

As were setting up, in the bitter cold I might add, the power kept blowing.

The city utility workers had to come to help us…there response was they were not equipped to handle any more juice than required to handle the Christmas tree lights each year.

I said, “Oh ok, no problem.”

If you believe that, you don’t know me very well.

No, I politely (I was told this by one of our volunteers) told them that our booth depended on power, we told it wouldn’t be a problem and that we needed to come up with a solution.

They mentioned that on the other side of the street was a more powerful transformer that could handle the load, so we ended up running an extension cord all the way across and taping it down with duct-tape.

Everything powered up then and we were on our way!

Throughout the day we handed out over 800 pieces of information about the church…some people even showed up yesterday to church after having met us!

We handed out more bags of popcorn in those 8 1/2 hours than we did in 8 total Experiences for the God at the Box Office series.

A couple of funny things happened….

We had cup stacking as one of the games people could play.
A young kid named David saw it and is really good at it…he stopped by and started showing his stuff.
It was drawing big crowds to our booth so we encouraged him to keep going…and he did…for 3 hours!
I joked to Brian Miller that we might have to pay him for his services.
By the way, I was the cup stacking champion amongst our people.
Not that I’m competitive or anything…just wanted to get that out there in case you were sitting there at your computer wondering, “Hmmm…who was the best cup stacker at our booth on Saturday?”
The other fun part for me was standing just outside our tent as people were walking by and yelling out, “Free Popcorn…who wants a bag of free popcorn.”
Fun because I got to work mostly with the Miller twins and fun because I make it fun.
For example, I’d yell it out but would add an “Except for Cowboys fans” or “Except for Penn State fans” if I saw someone with a ridicilous amount of team gear on.
My favorite moment came when I spotted an older gentleman about 30 feet away with his name on his jacket.
Right away I started yelling, “Free popcorn for anyone named Paul…free popcorn for anyone named Paul.”
He keeps walking on by and finally it dawns on him what I’m saying…he looks at me and says, “My name is Paul”. I told him he was in luck and to come on in and redeem his free popcorn.
Ah the little things I do to amuse myself.

All in all it was a great day…thanks to the 40+ of you who came out to volunteer throughout the day.

By the time we packed up, returned everything to the church and I got home, it was almost 7PM.

From the long hours, to having been on my feet all day to the cold weather, I was completly drained.

It really took a toll on me yesterday for the messages, so I’ll have to keep this in mind for the future.

During the afternoon, the Schwindt’s came over to hang out until we went to Jason and Megan Martin’s house for party for the worship team.

Jason is a farmer, so we took a hayride…which was again freezing cold but a lot of fun.

Another funny story…Jason had taken hay bales and set them up as tunnels that the kids could crawl through.

At one point Aaron’s son, Colin who is 3 years old went through but he got some hay down in the collar of his jacket which was scratching him.

He asked me to get it out…the problem was fingers were still freezing from the hayride.

Everytime my fingers touched his neck he’d start to cry because it was too cold…but as soon as I’d pull away he’d complain that the hay was scratching. It was sort of funny to see this pattern repeat 5 or 6 times as I got all the hay out.

Shortly after that we ate hamburgers and hotdogs and sat around a bonfire warming ourselves and then eating smores!

A good time was had by all!

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