The Great Pumpkin Chase

So last night Noah and I did an outreach event with our youth group that Noah did when he was in high school. It's called the Great Pumpkin Chase. (I believe NACC is doing a version of it tonight, so I'm told.) For those who don't know what this is, it is a scavenger hunt through the city, (in our case, two cities since Longview and Kelso run together.)looking for the Great Pumpkin. Noah and I came up with 12 locations for the clue locations, and Pastor Kevin was the great pumpkin. (We were going to get a pumpkin suit for him, but were running out of time so Barb, our secretary got him a bright orange pumpkin shirt.) After the hunt we had one of our youth lead us in some worship songs and Noah gave a gospel presentation.
Currently our youth group runs from about 20-25 students, Noah gave the kids a challenge to get 50 kids to the pumkin chase and then keep those kids coming to our youth group for the next 3 Sunday night youth groups. If the kids met this challenge, Noah would grow out his beard and shave his head like Mr. T. (the black guy from the A-team.)
Well, we only got 38 students, so Noah doesn't have to shave his head, but we had 17 students there that do not attend a church or have never set foot in a church until last night. That is very exciting!! It appeared that they all enjoyed themselves. Some of them came back this morning, hopefully we see some tonight too!!
This was Noah's first big event and he had been stressing out about it because he thought is was going to blow up in his face. It took 35 adult volunteers to pull this off. We needed two clue people at each location and drivers for ten teams that had vans or vehicles that could seat at least five people besides the driver. People were very willing to volunteer. We had parents of youth, young people in the church and elderly people as well. At the last minute, (an hour before the event) we had a driver call and tell us they couldn't make it) for those of you who know Noah and how stressed out he gets when preparing for something big, you can imagine his reaction. I went to get us dinner and drop Faith off at the sitters. I called in a couple of times to check on the progress of finding another driver, (he couldn't get a hold of anyone) he told me he wasn't sure what a heart attack felt like, but he was sure he was having one.
In the end everything worked out fine. We had a few of our kids who couldn't make it last minute, which opened up seatsbelts and we had some parents volunteer to drive when they dropped their kids off. We ended up not needing an extra driver and everything went well. Noah was quite pleased with the end results. We plan on making this our annual outreach event.