Hmm.

And we were like, wow, like we're such horrible people.

We can't even be married and be blessed.

And it just was a lot of shame.

We ended up finding someone else that would marry us, but it definitely felt like a scarlet letter experience, you know, just even on our wedding day, just felt a lot of shame.

And then after that, we tried to go back to church, but it was kind of like the elephant in the room.

And people don't know whether to say congratulations or I'm sorry.

What does the journey of healing look like? How would that even begin? How would you start to help somebody?

So tell my guest a little bit about you and your background.

Well, I had my own unplanned pregnancy when I was 19.

I grew up in church, had an amazing family, but I didn't have a relationship with the Lord.

And so I found out I was pregnant and I was so scared.

I thought, you know, you think of the worst case scenarios of what could happen.

And I thought my life was over.

My dreams were over, that everything was, you know, my life was going to be horrible.

What, um, at what point did you feel like God was stirring your heart to begin embrace grace?

And how long are these? Roughly, walk me through what the night's like.

Yeah.

I think that's what the fun part of it is, is it's not even that long.

Everyone gets there about 6 or 6.30, and then it's over by 8.30 or so, or we're announcing the winners at 8.30.

So it's not even a long event, not like golf, where it's All day long.

We start promoting about three months in advance.

And the way we do that is we do sponsor drops.

Can you be like sort of tactical and just walk us through the night sort of, well, maybe even before that you talked about when you reach out to sponsors, but like how early do the invites go out and then walk us through what a night's like?

Who are some of the artists? How do you partner with these? They're all, are they all local artists?

Yeah.

One, yeah, 100%.

We, um, so that started with Corolla Village Market in 2018.

We started jurying the artist.

Um, Rick Nielsen was one of our main painters, Carol Thompson, uh, Jackie Koenig, Beth Flyshaker.

We have photographers, potters.

And, and just, just walk us through how it's changed since you took it over last year.