Anniversary Showing

Two years ago we were rolling out plastic flooring in a church gym for the first showing of SOLD, not sure if it would ever go any farther or even if people would show up.

Today we can pull into the local community college with almost a dozen seasoned volunteers on our "travel team" list, people who can come together to lead this thing in any city where we could think to send them.

We can laugh at the quirks of it all, the memories of where that green bubble wrap came from or why we do it this way now instead of that way. Go slow and deliberate and still set it up or tear it down in two and a half hours instead of the once upon a three or four. Tease each other and laugh about the days when we used to walk on egg shells, uncertain of what we were getting ourselves into.

And, it's good.

Good to be able to step back far enough to see which site volunteers can take on more responsibility. Good to be able to hand them a procedure notebook and a pile of bins and set them loose on the decorating. Because, yes, we have procedure notebooks now. Careful lists and pictures to document every step of the process.

Good to stand around in the trailer and talk about the future that is coming faster than any of us could have ever anticipated.

An East Coast/ Mid West college tour with the Live Love Movement that will take us farther than we we've ever been before. A month of sending teams back and forth across the country to set this thing up and tear it down as many times as we can get away with.

A partnership with Hope Outfitters and their brand new t-shirt design for the months of May and June.

A constant stream of emails and cost estimates and purchase orders.

Because, it's not just my baby anymore. Not just a random collection of sketches in the back of a notebook. Not just an innocent question to my dad of, "Can we build this? Will it stand up?"

And, it seems so strange to think of the post-Haiti conversations that led us here. The quiet moments on a back porch with the youth pastor's wife, sipping from glasses of kombucha while she processed through a response to the things that we had seen and heard. The offhand challenge just before a meeting with the outreach pastor of, "We should see if there is some kind of an anti-trafficking exhibit we could bring in."

The long internet searches and the impossibly small budget that we set to build one ourselves. Piles of lumber in a borrowed barn and friends and family huddled around to examine donated blueprints in the biting cold.

The moving walls and moving walls and moving walls again. Countless volunteer hours and vacation days. Until somehow we have gotten here. Here where it isn't mine anymore and hasn't been for a long time. Here where this thing has taken on a life of its own.