A New Spin on FUNdraising!

Our Church is having a fundraiser to raise funds for child poverty. I'm so excited I can hardly wait til the day! The idea landed on me after a chain of events that came into total alignment with what I feel is Gods will for this event. We are calling it "Flippin' Accessories" and that is exactly what we are doing! People donate their old fine jewelry, costume jewelry, purses, belts, and scarfs, we will clean them, repackage, display them for resale and all the funds will go to child poverty.

We are also taking broken and damaged gold pieces. I have a friend who owns a jewelry store and he is willing to pay up to 600.00 an ounce! It's surprising how quickly it can add up if a few people donate a couple of small items each! I was down to see him today and he weighed a few pieces of damaged gold pieces and said he would pay me 150.00 for the 1/4 ounce I held in my hand!

The sale and coffee house will be set up at the Ministry Center of our Church. It will be decorated in a spring garden theme, with park benches and bistro sets set up around where you can sit with a friend for a little break, while browsing through the tables of accessories, we will be serving free coffee tea and fancy little sweets! We will be selling a few other items there as well. There will be a table set up where we will be selling Hershey Kisses Rosebud Flowers with little tags on then with different virtues so that you can customize your bouquet. For example if I were going to purchase 1/2 a dozen for one of my blogger friends I would chose virtues like "Loyal", "Kind", "Caring", "Thoughtful", "Humble ", and "Honest"!

Part of my confirmation to do this came from something that happened to me when I was a little girl.
I was 8 years old (my dad died when I was 6) when my mom who was a 27 year old widow and mother of 3 sat us around the kitchen table of a rundown old farm house which we were renting that was so cold in the winter that the little finish nails on the panel walls up stairs had frost on them. My mom blocked the upstairs off with layers of blankets. We had to sleep on the living room floor with hats and mittens on. So there at the table she proceeded to tell us that she had cancer and if something were to happen to her who would we want to live with...........I was in total shock and disbelief that there was a possibility that my brother, sister and I could loose both parents at such a young age, thus leaving us as orphaned. This would explain why I have a huge soft heart for widows and orphans. My mom later went upstairs to the freezing second floor and came down a little later with a fistful of her fine jewelry. She opened up the little potbelly wood stove in the kitchen and threw it all in to the red hot devouring embers. I watched her with a quizzical look on my face then said, "Mom, why did you just do that?" to which she replied something like "No treasures in this world are more important than my love for God". To this day I believe that she offered her treasures to God on that day as a prophetic act to prove that He was more important than any treasure here on earth and when he seen her love for her children He preserved her life. She went to the hospital and I wasn't sure I would ever see her again and here we are 30 years later and I still have my Mom.

Little did my mom nor I know that there was a seed planted in me that day and here I am offering my treasures to help with something that I not only see as a need in this old world but I know how it feels to not have much and to be hungry and cold.

One day a few weeks ago I opened my drawer were all these tiny little boxes of unused jewelry were and I seen images of children playing, they were dirty and the clothing they wore was tattered. I imagined they looked up at me and they were faces of children I knew. This was where I felt God started to unfold the pages of his plan.

The money we raise will be sent to a place called Nain which is an Inuit village in Labrador. It has the highest percentage of single parent families per capita in Canada. Our Church will be sending a team of missionaries there. Just look at these sweet little faces.

My second confirmation that I felt God calling us to do this was Luke 7:11-17 where Jesus went to a town called "Nain" (even spelled the same!) and met a "Widow" who was weeping because she was at the funeral of her "Child", he said to her "Don"t cry." then touched the coffin and said "Young man, I say to you, get up!" and he sat up and began to talk. The town rejoiced because God came to help His people. That right there was confirmation enough for me!

If you have read this post and it has pulled at your heart strings and you think you would like to donate some unused gold jewelry or even some damaged or broken gold pieces no matter how small (it all adds up) send me an e-mail and I'll give you my address. hitech@eastlink.ca I would LOVE to send our missionary team there with enough to offer them more that what is just sufficient to better their lives. To bring a N.O.A.H- New Offering And Hope.

Oh My Word! I just found out we just made front page news in our local paper! Check it out here!