Spring in Indiana. You know it’s here when the trees begin to flower, colorful tulips pop up, and you see garage sales signs at almost every neighborhood entrance. Our family has been participators in garage sales for years, both hosting and going to them. I’m not too proud to admit that through the years we’ve bought clothes for our kids, tools, household items, and most of our lawn furniture at garage sales. We held our first garage sale in 2002 when our neighborhood had a community sale. Reflecting back, it’s hard to believe that a garage sale turned out to be one of the most impacting and life-changing events in our lives. In those two days, we bought some picket fencing from a neighbor, Steph Staats, and met an amazing Lutheran lady, Elizabeth Bocek, when she stopped at our sale. She bought a worship CD and asked what we did. When she found out that I taught at a Christian college she was ecstatic. She said she was going to go get her son and introduce him to me. Three hours later she came back with her son, and three months later he enrolled at the college. Steph too found out that I was an instructor at a Christian college and the next day she pulled up to our sale, honked her horn, and motioned to Mary to come to her van. She wanted to start a neighborhood bible study, asked Mary if she would run it, and the rest is a crazy history that would take way too much space in this moment. Though there is so much more to the story, that garage sale became the catalyst of what would become Life Connections.
The lady’s bible study was an incredible hit, summer came, and the mom’s needed something for their kids to do during the study, so I took on the task of holding a weekly VBS for the summer. I recruited some students from the college to help and in the summer of 2002, we held our first VBS, Camp Blue Sky, so named for the street we lived on. We’ll forever be indebted to Micah Barley, Joe Landaw, Jamie MacDonald, Steve Bocek, and others who assisted us every Monday. We had games, activities, bible lessons, and of course tons of snacks. Some weeks we had over twenty kids attending and by fall things really began to explode. The bible study continued to grow, and though we weren’t fully grasping what God was doing, a church had been birthed. As more joined, we connected with the trendy bible study of the day, Purpose Driven Life, and by the summer of 2003 we were looking for a place to meet as a group. At a few of our gatherings, we had nearly 70 people in our home, with kids in our bedroom, youth in our garage, and adults filling most of our downstairs space. I’m not sure which, but on either a whim, impression from God, or just shear desperation, Mary approached the owner of a local preschool, the Goddard School, and he allowed us to use his facility for free! We held a few services there but soon realized we needed more space. Getting advice from one of my mentors, Pastor Chester Mitchell from Auburn Virginia, we moved into what would be our permanent location for five years, Brook School Elementary.
In 2007, James Coffey graciously donated five and a half acres of land to us, and by 2009 we were on our new campus. It’s been 21 unbelievable years since that weekend event and there’s no way we could have imagined what God would accomplish from those two days. We would do over 15 VBS’s, a dozen Breakfast with Santa’s and Bagels with Bunnies, be in parades and community events, and host the Fishers Strawberry Festival for 10 years. A garage sale that would end up in a multimillion-dollar campus, one that would give us a twenty-year ministry where we would see thousands of lives impacted by the gospel, and that it would be the way that God would give us a legacy that would far outlive our lives. Our story will always be a story of how God took two ordinary people and their two kids, used a garage sale, and did the miraculous. Live in faith, in a way where God can write an indescribable and unimaginable story in your life.