The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.  Rinse and repeat.  Job 1:21 reminds us that during this time, we should praise the name of the Lord, anyway!  For the past couple of months, we have been on such an unbelievable journey.  We are thankful for God’s provision.

Lourdes and I have been planning The Houston Natural Parenting Expo and Great Cloth Diaper Change for several months now.

The original venue we were going to hold the space was booked.  We were so disappointed, so we went on a hunt for a new venue.  In that time, we had hundreds of unanswered calls, email, and lots of “sorry we can’t” or “can you change the date” replies!

Then, we ran across a huge opportunity to use a space that was this crazy huge square footage number, like 95,000 or something like that.  It was a well known college campus, and we just knew it would be perfect.  After Lourdes went to visit, and a pretty nerve-racking wait period for the approval process, out of the blue, we received a reply that the concept is cool, but they had to book a last minute business related event in the space.

Square one, again.

At this time, we had two pretty awesome friends offer up their space.  The first one is the place we used for our event last year, and the second one was a smaller church.  Technically, we could make either of them work, but we knew that this event had the potential of being way too big for either space.

That’s about the time that we turned everything over to Jesus!  This was over a month ago.

Jesus doesn’t tell us that his blessing are going to be instantaneous.   He asks us to be steadfast in our faith, lean on Him, and trust that he will provide.

Provide, he did.

We found a really, really awesome space with lots of perks, and we knew that the name of the location alone would draw a big crowd!  We had no idea just how BIG of a crowd it would draw.  We got all of the details from the representative of the business, and the place sounded perfect.  With the current number of RSVPs we had for the event, it seemed to be a total blessing from God.

Overnight, our numbers doubled.

Two weeks ago, Lourdes and I went to visit the space to map out our setup and get the final information of everything we needed for the big day.  We had every intention of signing the contract, paying the deposit, and reporting back to our vendors and attendees that this was going to be THE best location yet!

We were wrong.  Don’t get me wrong, the venue itself is awesome.  It’s well known, large, and totally somewhere I’d want to have a really cool event (not tied to a Guinness World Record! ha!), but it turned out that it wasn’t the event for this event.

This is the space we were allotted.  Much of the perimeter was not useable (the stairs and on the opposite side the entry for restrooms and a few other areas) due to fire code or storage space.

You see, because our numbers had doubled and were on the verge of tripling by the time we went to map it out, once we actually saw the space, there was no way everyone would have fit.  There was also really no way to have check in and registration, and we would have been severely limited on the number of vendors we have – by a third.

When we left the location, we went eat at one of our favorite post-event gourmet hotdog restaurants, and tried to come up with a plan.  We drew a blank, but the hotdogs were good.

We drove around Houston for the remainder of the day.  We wrote down numbers, looked up addresses and websites on our phones, called offices, reached out to a few Facebook friends, and nothing was available.  We decided to call the same well-known college system, just a different location, and to our surprise, the date was actually AVAILABLE!  The really nice Special Events Coordinator sent us specs of the location, prices, rules, etc., and it was perfect.   All we had to do was fill out the information, and he’d let us know when we were approved.

Now, at this point, we know that the Lord provides, but just in case this was one of those teaching moments, we decided to keep looking.  You know – just in case.

We stopped at a coffee shop for some brain saving rations and much needed inspiration, and decided to just start cold calling.  Did you know that Harris County (maybe any county) Public Libraries will allow events, however, they do not allow any money to exchange hands at any time on their premises?  I found that out, rather abruptly that day!  After calling several places, we decided to call a location that was suggested to us by one of the event attendees a week or so back.  The person on the other end of the phone was intrigued, and she would get back with us on approval!

The following day or so, I received an email for this really great, roomy venue, and because they are a non-profit facility, their venue fee for the date and times we needed was almost triple what the perk-filled location was that we visited!  Scratch that.

Thus commences the back and forth emails between the well-known college’s other location (which happened to be less than half the price of the perk-filled location that we previously had our hearts set on).  After a week and a half of back and forth and long periods of time with no response, we just knew it was time to give up on that.

The Lord takes away.  (Technically, he never gave, but he did give hope, so in our minds, that was something!)

Not using the perk-filled location was the most stressful situation I’ve been in in some time.  We did not want to announce that we’re not using the space, because we still had high hopes for our event, and we still had faith that the Lord would come through for us.  We did not want to cause a mass panic and risk a huge drop in our numbers by announcing “Hey, we outgrew it, but we don’t really have a plan yet.”

We decided to go back to one of the original venues that we wanted to use and give them a call to see if the space was available.  At this point, faith was just about all we had.  I mean, three weeks from the event – without God on our side, that space would totally not be available.

Guess what… The Lord gave.  After waiting a few days, I decided to reach out to the rep again, and she let me know that the space was definitely available.  It was a tough decision because the cost was significantly more than the perk-filled location, but we decided to jump on it.

When we arrived at the United Way Center to tour it (we’ve been to several events there before, so we really didn’t need to, but through our trials, God nudged us to go check it out anyway), we had such a feeling of peace with the roominess of the facility.  It didn’t just stop there… The Lord kept on giving. Not only did they give us a discount due to the number of hours we will be there, but she is also allowing some pretty cool things we have up our sleeve, and she added on TWO meeting rooms, free of charge, so that we can have our breakout sessions away from the expo!

We will have all of this space (the round tables will not be there!) to use.

We will also have this hallway to use for registration and anything else we need.  In addition, we’ll be able to use rooms E & F.

This space is also ours to use for the day.

Let me tell you how we know that this WHOLE situation was a blessing from God.  You see, He kept giving and taking away.  Had He not given the opportunities along the way, our number would have never grown.  Had He not given us hope with the perk-filled location, our numbers never would have tripled.  Had he not taken away, we’d have been forced to limit the number of vendors as well as attendees (something we’ve never wanted to do).   Because we’re volunteers, and we start out with a budget of ZERO, if the numbers would have not tripled, we would have never had the budget to even consider the United Way Center!

We are so thankful that the Lord has given us the strength to continue with our labor of love for yet another event.  We love to bring the natural parenting community great events where people can meet and mingle as well as make new friends and learn more about the different aspects of cloth diapering, breastfeeding, natural living, natural birthing and so much more.

This experience, my friends is why I’m Learning to Lean.