This past weekend as we celebrated Thanksgiving like all of us had much to be thankful for. Yet one unique situation stands out. Let me explain. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving is usually a very productive day because we want to everything taken care of given that it is a short work week and that we want to enjoy our time with family and friends not preoccupied with work details. I had anything but that type of Wednesday.
There was a last-minute pastoral situation that I had to take care of as I was about to leave for the day (a possible future post) and looming on me was the fact that a critical print piece that would play a central role in our service that Sunday was not printed and prepared yet. For months we had this vision of providing our church members with a tool to help them invite friends to services this Christmas. When we received the invites on Tuesay that would need to be put into holders there was a significant spelling error on the card. The mistake was not on our end. The team wrestled whether we could just give the cards but we unanimously agreed that was not option being that this would be for many of our seeking friends the first impression of our church in which we spelled Wednesday incorrectly.
So we scrambled trying to find a printer to get it re-done no small task given the holiday and then there was the nature of getting the cards put in the holders -- we had a team ready to go on Tuesday, but now the cards would not be done until Friday -- thankfully. So here is why I am so grateful and why I serve with arguably the best volunteer teams! We put the word out to some of our existing teams to meet extra early at 7:30am to put the invitation pieces together. I had estimated a 2 and 1/2 hour window of time to get it done with different people rotating in. Instead people got there before 7:30 and a big team showed up and it was done in less than 45 minutes. The load was lightened also by two incredible people -- our LIT leader Alex Layson and cafe Leader who took on the task to jump start the process by taking some of the work home on Friday and Saturday.
What was particularly meaningful was how those involved and those who showed up to see the task completed really saw this as a significant win.