West Coast Tour: The Rainbow Gathering

Our team finally arrived in Montana and met up with us. It was so wonderful to see them. Didn’t realize how much we had missed everyone taking off early. We spent a couple of days getting ourselves ready to head into the Gathering, and then we hopped in the bus and took off for South-Western Washington, where the Gathering was held this summer.

It was a very interesting year. Well, actually, it was a hard year for me. Ha! It started off with hiking in later in the day (we usually hike into the Gathering in the morning) and then on top of that…it rained! This was my 10th national Gathering and I have never had to hike into a Gathering in the rain. It wouldn’t have been so bad had it just been rain…but there were still snow banks taller than me all around…so the rain was COLD!! Needless to say we tried to hike in as fast as we could and get all our tents set up and our personal stuff brought in but by that time we were all soaked and our stuff was soaked and the sun was going down. BURR!! I attempted to make dinner for our team that night, but we had forgotten all the cooking utensils, so I made pasta with a tent pole…interesting.

We had a hard time getting ourselves together after that first day. We normally go into the National Gathering with almost 30 people on our team and this year we had 20. We normally have our kitchen set up and running by the afternoon of our 2nd day at the Gathering, and this year we were limping along and not completely set up by the 4th day that we were there. A few of us took turns being in charge of the cooking in the kitchen…which we normally do, but this year it was 10 straight hours of cooking in one day for each of us. I would try to have at least two meals cooking, beans in the pressure cooker cooking and two meals being prepared to cook with each meal serving at least 150 people. Not to mention having to make sure to get beans, lentils and rice soaking so that they would cook faster. Praise the Lord that we each had “Kitchen Monkey’s” (someone to help us do all the cooking for the day…thanks Michaela!!!!) this year! Usually by 2:30ish I would get delirious and not really know what I was doing…it truly was the grace of God that any food got made at all! Ha! This year I also learn how to use a saw and cut wood for our bonfires, yep, in 10 years I had never pick up a saw and I didn’t even cut any fingers off!

All this to say, I really learned that in our weakness God is strong! I learned that God can still move regardless of me. Praise the Lord because He is SO good! So even though I think it was a tough gathering and I really can’t remember all of the details because of delirium, I do know that God moved, people got to see Jesus in us and we got to love on the Rainbow Family!


Picture: Me cooking away in the Jesus Kitchen