The upcoming County Fair!

Our County Fair is coming up in a few weeks. The Lord put it on my brother’s heart to have a booth and give away free soda and gospel tracts. He’s asked if the rest of the family will help he and his wife at the booth. It sounds like a great opportunity – and we’re all excited. But, WOW, there are a lot of details to work through.

The first challenge relates to the soda. What type, and how much. A fountain is out of the question because we won’t have a water line, and it would be too expensive to rent. The Fair is expecting 17,000-22,000 people during the week – but we expect only 1 in 10, or 1 in 20 to be willing to accept a free soda (people will wonder what the catch is). The next choice was either 2 liter’s or can’s. The can’s are nice in that we then don’t need cups or ice to go in the cups. So, we’re planning on can’s.

The next problem is how to chill so many cans. We thought about trying to chill the cans, then put them into coolers with a layer of ice in-between. Then we realized that the old house that is on the property next to us (that the Lord provided for us earlier this year) has a refrigerator – and we could take that out to the fair. By taking all the shelves out, and stacking carefully (but, even then, we’ll have to have spacers between each layer to allow air circulation), we figure we can get about 200 cans in the fridge. By filling the fridge each night, we’ll have a cool supply the next evening. We can also put about 50-75 in the freezer, and estimate they’ll be cold in 1.5 to 2 hours, and then can move them to the fridge. We’ll still bring a cooler, so that we can take cans out (in batches) of the fridge, put them in cooler (with some ice), and serve from there.

A lot of logistics – and still lots to be done. We need to make sure we have A LOT of good tracts. I also need to look at my balloon animal supplies. If things get slow, I can always draw children by making balloon animals (and then the others at the booth can offer soda and tracts to the adults). Also, we’ll need a banner designed and printed up for the booth…

One big question is whether people will accept free soda’s. Another idea we have for next year (depending upon how this year goes), would be to pay for a food license (our current license for this year isn’t a food license – so we can’t sell food – but we can give it away!) and then sell soda’s at cost. While most people may not want to accept “charity” (in a free soda), a lot of people may be willing to buy an ice-cold soda for $.25, or even $.20. If we get a food license, we’ll be put in the food court, and we might end up making some of the other food vendors upset if we’re selling cheap soda’s. I don’t think they’ll be bothered this year since we’ll be in a different area, and we’re not sure how many people will be aware that we’ll be giving out soda’s.

We’ve already started praying for hearts and repentance and salvations during that week. May the Holy Spirit work powerfully in hearts!

I’ll post updates as the Fair draws closer and then during and/or after the week.