3 down, 5 to go

BEST. ONE. YET. I could just stop with that, but I think that would leave you wondering why it was so great, so here's a summary...

We drove by earlier today and got a little freaked out. The park that we went to, Heritage Park, is also a huge Sports Complex, and the main place for soccer games. There had to have been 1,500 people in the park! No joke. We looked at our 100 burgers and started to get a little scared. We prayed that God would multiply the food if need be. Thankfully, be the time we got there, the soccer games had cleared out, but the skate park hadn't! That's what we were hoping for. Word spread real fast that free food and drinks had arrived, so the skaters loved that we were there and began cleaning us out of drinks real quick. Nate had to run back home to grab more drinks and it's a good thing we did - we probably went through 300 drinks!

We got to hang out with skaters all evening. We watched them skate, threw the football around, talked church, and just hung out. They loved our music, and were amazed that I am the pastor. They've never seen a pastor dress/look like me. We also met about 12 people who just showed up. One couple heard about us from a family member in Albuquerque that had passed our info onto them, and most of the rest saw our ads on craigslist and campbellyardsales.com (a local craigslist-type site), and decided to come see what it was all about. Most of them didn't want food, they just wanted to meet us and hang out, so that's what we did. We told them all about our Wednesday night Bible study that's starting up this week and it sounds like almost all of them will be there! I thought I would teach the first few Bible studies to just 2 or 3 people, but it's looking like we may start around 15! WOW!

The skater crowd seems to be very overlooked out here, but with our experience with skate parks, we hope to put an end to that. They lit up when we talked about hosting a skate competition at their park! They were all for it and want to help any way they can. We hope to host a competition some time in the next few months, then maybe next summer, if a mission trip team comes out here, we'll do something huge with a big band, maybe some pro skaters, etc. More on that later (when it's a bit more realistic).

All in all, it was the best one yet. Great response. Lots of excitement. About 60 burgers and 50 hot dogs! We'll definitely be back to Heritage Park. We made some good friends.

Head to our UNIGHT pictures page to check out pics from tonight's event and please keep the next 5 in your prayers! You can specifically pray that God will provide financially for the outreaches. This one really cleaned us out and we'll need to almost completely restock for next week. That's a good problem though.