Easter in the Cascades

Over the past few months, our church has taken in a neighborhood in Mooresville that is a lower income area. We've done 4 events in the neighborhood park since Christmas. Whether it's passing out coats, doing a Valentines party, or just the bus coming thru on a weekly basis to pick kids (and adults) up for church, we have specifically targeted this area of town to build relationships in and share the love of Christ with these people. So, when we started talking about an Easter event, obviously this neighborhood was the place to do it!  So, after the pastors started talking they decided that a big blow-out event was in order :)

After getting church people to stuff 5000 eggs, it was the day of the event. and everyone was so excited to see what God was going to do in the converging of this community with our church community. 

The Andersens are always in charge of tech stuff 

and so we're teaching our littles how to be good roadies :)

 It's so fun to see all of our people interacting with people who are outside of our "normal" people.
 It changes everyone's heart when we begin to walk out the heart of God toward the less fortunate.

The guys had originally had the idea of having the eggs drop out of a helicopter. And since we "happened" to have access to both a helicopter and a pilot, it seemed that it was all a "go"   Until the day before - after lots of advertising had gone out about the helicopter being there- we had to go with a different pilot who was uncomfortable to how close the drop would be to houses. So, the helicopter was off :(  

Thankfully, the Mooresville Fire Department came thru in a BIG way!!  

with a truck and a long ladder, it's almost as good as a helicopter :)

 LOOK AT ALL THOSE EGGS!!  

and it wasn't even half of them. People from church spread out most of them on the ground on the baseball field they were going to be dumped on, and the firemen only dropped two garbage bags onto the field. It was still super cool to watch!

and then, the kids were off! running to collect as many eggs as possible

 Cadence was big enough to be out on the field with the school age kids. It's crazy to think that our baby girl is a big kid. But she is!! and had SO much fun out gathering eggs. 

 The littles were far less concerned with their egg hunt. 

Thankfully their big sister had enough eggs to share. 

So, the Andersen boys just manned the sound system instead :)

on a personal note, we met some of Shaun and Olivia's biological family at this event. The Lord had somewhat warned me ahead of time - ya know, one of those gut feelings - so I wasn't stunned. But it's still a little hard to process that Olivia has older sisters who are hurting because they no longer have a relationship with their baby sister who they have known since her birth. We don't really know what to do with all of it - if anything - but we know that God is able to do ridiculously more than we could come up with as far as "best case scenarios" and so we will trust His leading if there is anything more that comes of our meeting with their family. 

But if ever there was a time to be reminded of exactly how capable our God is - it's Easter weekend!