2021 will go down in history as the year when we defied all the odds, as the year when all of us filled with hope for survival and a prayer for our return to normal came together to profess our love of God and Country.
We have been not just hungry for the last year for our events to open but starved for the chance to be able to come together as a community and see each other’s smiling faces and hear the laughter. Returning to normal is what we have all prayed for and those prayers brought like-minded people together for a common cause. Prayers are not enough, and it takes hundreds if not thousands of hours of preparation and devotion to put together each event in our community.
When you pick up a small stone and cast it into a still pond, you’re not thinking of the ripple effect it has or how far it reaches. This is the ripple of one prayer.
Blessings to all the volunteer board members and committees of the God and Country Festival who donate their time and money to make sure that we can publicly announce our convictions and who have fought to carry on this tradition for over 55 years. The list is too long to mention, but you know who you are.
Blessings to the team that worked for months with the City of Nampa, the Canyon County Commissioners, and Southwest District Health Department to reopen our community so that we could come together; Nampa City Councilman Victor Rodriguez, David Ferdinand with the God and Country Festival, Sue Marostica with Stampede Days, and Tim Theibert with the Snake River Stampede Rodeo. Thank you for being brave enough to take a stand.
Blessings to all the sponsors and public servants who jumped in to breathe life back into the FREE event. It always takes a village, but it took the conviction of the major sponsors who jumped in to make this event happen in such a short timeframe, Evergreen Home Loans, Homes of Idaho, Ed Humphreys for Idaho, Idaho Central Credit Union, and Janice for Idaho.
Blessings to James and crew of Fireworks America of Idaho for making sure we had fireworks for the show. Fireworks needed to be ordered many months ago when everything was still shut down. James fronted the money and overdelivered for the budget that was available. He put his faith in the fact that our sponsors would come through and the city would open.
Blessings to all the patrons and presenters who stood quite literally to the test of fire. With triple digit temperatures and equipment malfunctions because of it, not to mention what it does to people’s spirits and tempers, we all survived and proved that one prayer can cause a ripple to cure our community and return everyone’s faith in another tomorrow.
