Our church had its first-ever Harvest Party in our brand new building last night! I coordinated games and a friend coordinated the chili cook off. We were hoping for about 50 people if we were lucky. We ended up with OVER 300 people!!! It was amazing. The games for children went extremely well--they were simple, like bobbing for apples and rolling gourds to knock over pins, and throwing hoops over pumpkins. Our pastor played guitar on the hayride, driven by our other pastor, and we had horses to pet and a Team Extreme show (men who bent metal with their teeth, crushed soda cans on elbows, ripped phone books in half, etc.). It was so fun! I really enjoyed it.
Then--a volunteer commented that SHE could have done much more with the games. She does carnival-style games all the time. And HER husband's a DJ. He could have DJ'd for us. Plus bobbing for apples is horrible--there's some evil pagan ritual associated with it. I started to feel defensive and ended up just thanking her for volunteering to help.
As I thought about her comments, I realized some things. First, she may have been able to jazz up the games. She may have been able to coordinate everything. But she didn't. She didn't volunteer and pour all the work in to this event. She didn't tell us that her husband would volunteer his DJ services. Second, perhaps she's looking to feel needed. She needed to feel superior and judgmental, and I'm sorry for her. Thirdly, we had a VERY limited budget of less than $100 and we had a time frame of less than two months to pull this together. And did I mention we just moved to Utah 4 months ago? I hate when people just assume we know their talents.
However, in all, we truly could not have asked for a better evening.
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