I’m not always at Rainbow on Saturday mornings, but today I was and boy am I glad! I went mainly to say goodbye to the group of senior highers and sponsors who will be spending the next 24 hours at Camp Mennoscah. Since I’ve been on so many of these trips (too many to count), I often wondered what it would feel like to be the one staying behind waving goodbye. Maybe I was secretly hoping they would invite me along but that didn’t happen:)

I thought I’d be at Rainbow for 20 minutes at most. (Jesse was preparing breakfast for us after all.) Then more cars of parents and teenagers started pulling up. “We are looking for the garden,” they said. I then saw our master gardener Aaron Barnhart and realized that it must be a work day with the Youth Volunteer Corp of KC.  The last I saw, at least 10 students had come to work in the hot August sun, alongside Aaron, who is a masterful gardener and educator.

Not 10 minutes later, more cars began to pull up to Rainbow. I then remembered the Kansas City chapter of the  American Guild of Organists was meeting at Rainbow.

The place was buzzing with life, and all before 10 am.

Many churches don’t see a full parking lot except on Sundays or for other special events like funerals or weddings. Not so at Rainbow! Sometimes I’ll pull in to our parking lot on a Tuesday and can’t even find a spot. (This happened on August 5 since we are a neighborhood polling place.)  I’ve started to repeat a phrase I have heard many others say, “You never know what’s going to happen at Rainbow!”

Yes, my breakfast was cold by the time I got home, but I didn’t care.