Pushing through to the end

Mary and I met at a convention years ago. More recently we both worked with our financial partner to create a new event. If you didn’t read Part One, CLICK HERE.  If you didn’t read Part TWO, CLICK HERE.  If you didn’t read Part THREE, CLICK HERE.  

Prayers for guidance

God found us the help we needed.  I led my family in prayer for an audio / visual specialist, and a woman from our church brought them to us.  We prayed for a professional videographer, and he was brought in to John’s business within days.  Right guidance led us and miracles came easily and in the perfect time.

Mary was building teams of volunteers and organizing the event, minute by minute.  She spent long hours on the phone working with the other contributors, performers, and vendors to make sure they were all happy, and that everything was working the way it should.

I decided to design some banners of prominent Scottish family crests as decoration.  This turned into a series of very large family crest art pieces, and deep research into officially-recognized tartans.

When I started to research my own family line, I found that the McFarland Clan was essential to the history of the Scottish War of Independence.  The McFarlands were a critical clan when it came to the war, and loyal to Robert the Bruce even when other clans were not. 

I produced a complicated 45 minute travelogue video which was directed by John and Mary working together for weeks over email and phone.  I forgot all about that.

Our financial partner was covering the costs of production, shipping, and some gas but was not able to cover the vast depth of labor we had put into the work due to shouldering the burden on his own.  Our business and family was being choked out, and we still didn’t have our highway car back.  However, the event was going to look great.

THE EVENT FINALLY COMES

Mary and I both have past restaurant management experience and could see the food cart problems coming a mile away.  We tried to intervene for weeks but were blocked.  Instead that situation cost us hours of organizational time at the event itself.

When the day of the event came Mary and I spent the whole day putting out fires.  Mary stepped up as MC for the whole event because the arranged-for volunteer had a family emergency.  That was actually a wonderful development for the show, because the whole event was in her head.  She had a perfect moment-by-moment understanding of the needs of the show.

Working with the needs of the volunteers and vendors kept her occupied every minute before, during, and after the event.  Our child was cared for by a loving volunteer family.  My knee was injured from running.  This injury has not yet healed a year later and still causes me to walk with a limp.

Mary and I were so busy fixing avoidable issues which had been foreseen, but the warnings ignored.  I never got my own booth put together.  This was a sad little circumstantial blow to us and our business.

We had volunteer information packets, schedules, and signage organized and ready to print, but Mary and I had no money to replace our home printer toner.  We made arrangements to have a printer at the event, but that request was overlooked.  This led to unnecessary organizational problems we had to manage aggressively all day. 

(I found a group of cosplayers whom I recognized from a set of novels we share in common… from the Wheel of Time we have Elayne Trakand, Olver, and Matrim Cauthon… they loved that someone knew who they were dressed as).

THE BRUCE FESTIVAL

It had been planned from the start for the entire event to feature John as the figurehead.  The Bruce Festival was conceived of for that purpose.  He desired to mingle and tell stories, and so we had intentionally organized everything else around that concept.  He wanted a day to self-promote, and we were happy to be running the event from the background. 

We expected only to be compensated for our time before winter came, and to receive credit where credit was due.  These were never unreasonable expectations.  I still don’t understand what went wrong.  It has never made sense to me.

Mary and John taking a quiet moment to refocus.

Mary and I will always look back with fondness on our time co-founding The Bruce Festival, and with sadness towards the future plans we had for expanding the event which now will never manifest.