The Countdown is on for "Shine Your Light" 2009

With only four days left until our family's 3rd annual "Shine Your Light" event, Liam and Caroline were helping me today to prepare our house. For the past few years we have hosted a party at our house on Halloween night for all of our neighbours. I posted about our event last year and you can check it out from the link above. Our worship team plays tunes, church family members come over to meet people, we hand out hot chocolate for parents and candy bags with scripture on them for the kids. It is a really fun time. It is such a natural opportunity to get to know people that live around us and to let them know a little bit more about our family and for us to shine our light in our community.

I like to decorate the house with more of a fun factor than a fear factor so most of our decorations are homemade. Our costumes are often homemade as well, and we raid second hand stores and our craft bins to make things work. Everyone really gets into it, the worship team helps us with lots of candy and they have come up with some pretty stellar costumes over the past few years. It is not every day that kids get to see Mr. Potato Head
(Jason's costume last year) playing the electric guitar. Parents and kids often stick around and dance our driveway and we get a chance to meet them and have some good conversations. I would encourage you to think of what you can do to shine your light in your neighbourhood on Saturday night. Maybe you don't have a worship team to play but you could play CD's or your MP3 player on a stereo. You could sit on your porch and say hello to parents as they bring their kids around. Attach encouraging scripture to your candy or write positive messages with chalk on your driveway. Hand out coffee or hot chocolate...really the possibilities are endless.

Today, as we were starting to set up a couple of girls walked by and they began talking about what a great time they had on our front lawn last year. Trinity was so excited to hear that they had liked it and that they remembered our house. It was a great teachable moment to talk to her about why we do this and to pray with her for our neighbourhood and for more opportunities to love our neighbours. Praying with TJ is always such a blessing as she is so honest before the Lord. Her prayer today was simple "Please Jesus make people come to our party and let them see how much fun you are." And to that I said "Amen."