Trunk or Treat

Our new church Whitewater Crossing Christian Church hosted its Trunk or Treat this weekend. All through September, they asked for candy donations and people to sign up to work the event. Here's the pic I stole off the church's website. 

Knowing that this was the weekend right after the twins were to be born, we didn't sign up to volunteer. We didn't know if we'd get up to see the twins before Saturday, so we just dropped off our candy donations. Then when Saturday rolled around, Kyler thought we should go and see if they needed any help. I felt bad that we didn't sign up in the first place and tried to talk to him out of going, but he really thought we should go.

So we did.

And man, it was an incredible event. Kyler and I were asked to help be greeters. We passed out bags that held tickets for hayrides, pumpkins, and food to each person. To say that we were needed is an understatement. Last year, they had 1300 people show up. This year...man, we had 2700 people show up. It was unlike anything I'd ever seen. Lots of children and their parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents showed up, and I would say over half of them were unchurched. Add to that the 300 volunteers there, and that's 3000 people on our church's campus.

We had 2000 pre-prepared bags with tickets, and we ran out. Then we just started ripping the tickets off the big rounds of tickets and ran out of those! So then, I just started telling people to go on through the lines and let the other volunteers know that we ran out of tickets! It was just unbelievable.

Not only did the kids get to go through the lines of trunks to get candy, there were hayrides to a pumpkin patch, carnival games, a couple of fair rides, blow-up bounce houses, face-painting, and food.

It was so incredible to see so many people in the community all in one spot. We love our new church, the pastor, and the new friends we've been able to make there. But this event just made me love it even more. When we started running low on candy and hotdogs, we didn't turn people away. They sent people out to buy more! Kyler and I feel so blessed to be a part of the church whose main mission is to bring the unchurched to church, and this was just one event where it was so evident that we would go to extreme measures to do so. I heard there were folks still out there at 11pm last night cleaning everything up to get ready for Sunday morning.