An End to Angels

Relay for Life season is coming to its end for 2013. Over the past year, you’ve heard about my preparations and fundraising for my church’s team Angels for a Cure. It’s the last time I’ll be able to say I’m on a team of Angels, at least one that raises money to fight against cancer.

We went out with a bang. We won fifth place overall for fundraising and got first place for most number of laps walked. We went to the silver team level, raising over $4500 which was $1,000 over our goal.

It was an amazing year, starting with a garage sale last October and finishing with photography sessions this April just a couple weeks before the actual Relay. We also had our first ever Chili Cookoff and a two-day bake sale to end all bake sales. We auctioned off donated items at the Elks annual auction and ate at Ruby Tuesday’s, getting ten percent for the team. We sold over $900 in luminaria as well as several trackmarkers, something we had never sold before.

We had the final team party on Tuesday and got the photos of our team, lapel pins for being a silver team and bumper stickers. My cohort in crime Mindy Collin came with me. I would not have been able to do it without her. She took over the Chili Cookoff when I told her my mother was dying and made it a success.

She wasn’t the only one. She and Carolyn Whitman called me almost daily before Relay organizing every detail. Melanie and Gerry Rodrigues decorated for the Chili Cookoff and Andy August was a kind of master of ceremonies and organizational coach. 

Melanie also helped me hawk muffins at Relay despite her assertion that I was a pirate in a former life. Her cheesecakes brought in a hefty amount at our bake sales, too. Jorunn Warren brought four kinds of muffins to Relay including Reeses peanut butter cup and brookies (brownie and cookie muffins).

I can’t forget Samantha Roberts, whose pina colada scrub was a hit at Relay and who styled hair for us, sold two trackmarkers and taught us all how to make beautiful hair ribbons to sell. Her mother Jennifer Romito helped with the hair and made us pretty Relay pins to give out while her other daughter Maddie stayed and walked most of the night to help us earn the most laps walked trophy.

Diane and Doug Wallborn showed up at Relay with more pins and hair ribbons to sell which Diane quietly put out with a smile. Erica Davenport and daughter came to Relay after her long day of work delivering babies. Jan Grover used her cooking talents for banana bread at Relay and her famous peanut chocolate clusters at the bake sale.

Carrie Gardner and her two daughters Cassie and Bailey couldn’t make it to Relay, but baked and helped at all the events beforehand. Stephanie Ball was a big help at the garage sale and stayed to the end despite the donation truck’s late arrival. A final thank you to someone who wasn't even officially on our team but showed up at Relay with gifts for our raffle and food for us and stayed to help long into the night. Thanks, Mary Ilene Mohler.

I could go on and I’m leaving out plenty but the gist of it is that I had an awesome team of Angels who never gave up fighting against cancer. I am honored to call them my team of Angels for a Cure. Thank you, all of you, my Angels.

Foster CARE

Next week is your chance to do something for kids in foster care. Even if you can’t take a child into your home, you can do something for them and the families that care for them. What can you do? You can pray and ask others to pray for the more than 400,000 children in our nation’s foster care system, as well as their families, their workers, and the Church’s response to the foster care crisis.

You can find a map of prayer vigils already scheduled at the Cry of the Orphan’s website. They offer a prayer guide you can download as well.

May is National Foster Care Month. We just celebrated Mother’s Day and Father’s Day is around the corner. Can you put yourself in the place of a foster child who has been waiting to be adopted for three years or more? That’s the average time that a child waits in foster care to be adopted but they can wait five years or more or never get adopted. Those years are usually spent in several different foster homes, not just one. Many are older kids, with the average age of children waiting to be adopted from foster care being eight years old.

Each year an estimated 28,000 young people age out of the U.S. foster care system at age 18 without an adoptive family. Of those, 77 percent of females become pregnant by the age of 23 or 24, compared to 40 percent of the general population. Eighty-one percent of males are arrested by that age, compared to 17 percent of the general population. Over half experience one or more periods of homelessness. Nearly 30 percent are incarcerated at some point. These facts are from Cry of the Orphan.

Can you imagine having no family to fall back on at the tender age of 18? Do you remember how vulnerable you were back then? Imagine trying to find a job, a place to live and then support yourself totally. These kids need your prayers. Or, can you imagine being uprooted from your family and sent to a new home with little to nothing of your own? That’s what happens to these kids through no fault of their own.

There are some great organizations out there that help these kids. One is Foster Care to Success which provides scholarships to college, care packages and mentors for foster kids. They accept applications to be mentors starting in June.

One Simple Wish provides wishes to foster children. They also provide prom dresses and personal care items for foster care kids. Together We Rise provides thousands of foster kids across the country with sports equipment, bicycles, and suitcases so that they don’t have to travel from home to home in a trash bag.

These are just a few of the organizations out there that help foster children. Pray for them next week and if you feel led to do something then, check them out. God Bless.

 

 

 

Day by Day

It’s national teacher appreciation week and although this is the last day today, I wanted to share the great idea that my son’s Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) had because it is both easy and creative. Maybe some of you can share it with your own PTAs or PTOs. His PTO designated a different gift idea for each day of the week and asked parents to do as little or as much as they wanted.

Monday was chocolate day. My son has six teachers so we bought six jumbo Hershey bars, one for each of them. Tuesday was school supply day. I personally think Post–it Notes are very useful, so I bought a few packs in bright colors for each teacher.

Wednesday was flower day. I asked my son if he wanted to get flowers for all his teachers or just the female ones. He has three male teachers and three female ones. He chose to get flowers just for the ladies. I bought a bunch of roses and wrapped a stem for each teacher in a wet paper towel covered in aluminum foil to keep the water from getting out.

Thursday was a day for handmade items, like thank you notes or homemade goodies. My son wanted me to bake something for his teachers, but I told him it must come from him, not me. He doesn’t cook very often so I bought him a mix for blueberry muffins and he baked them.

Today is the last day and it’s fruit day, so we got his teachers his favorite kind of apple—Gala.

What a week!  When I was a teacher, I would have loved getting these kinds of things.

I’ve been working at a school the past few months, not teaching, but still around teachers. This week at the school they’ve gotten all kinds of sweet goodies in the morning and catered lunches as well. The pulled pork they had today smelled so good that I mentioned that to a teacher and she said, “I feel so appreciated.”

It doesn’t take much to make a teacher feel appreciated. They are giving people to start with so they appreciate everything they are given.

I also got my share of hugs today from the kids. I worse a velour shirt that’s very soft and all the kids were coming up to give me a hug or touch my shirt. It’s amazing how nice a hug from a first grader feels. It just brightens your whole day. 

So, if your son or daughter didn’t do anything for Teacher Appreciation Week this week, it’s not too late to make a teacher feel appreciated. Have them write a little note to their teacher or make them some cookies, but most importantly, have them deliver them with a hug (or for the older ones, at least a smile).

As they say, if you can read this, thank a teacher. They deserve your appreciation this week and all year long!

Today is the Day!

Today is the day. Today we have the Relay for Life in my hometown. We have already made about $500 over our goal of $3500 so I’m very happy going into the Relay. 

I am so excited about today. We’re going to be selling homemade coconut salt scrub that our Miss Pinterest Sam Roberts has made for us. She also had the idea of making hair ribbons and got us started on that. 

We’re going to be braiding hair, doing nails, selling jewelry and raffling some items, too. While the moms are getting pampered, we have some games for the kids to do as well. As for food, we went pretty simple, just muffins, apples, bananas, green tea, water and coffee. 

We’re having a spa theme to the booth this year and I’ve called it the Angels for a Cure Stress Reduction and Cancer Prevention Booth! I can’t wait to see what all the other teams are doing. I hope we make our goal for the Relay.

Our team has really come together. I’m so thankful to them. When my mother was sick, they kept right on through the Chili Cookoff without me. Now, a few of our members have out of town commitments this weekend and everyone else is stepping up. I really enjoyed seeing them get to know each other and become a real team.

Unfortunately, with all that’s been going on in my life, I haven’t written here for a couple weeks and for that I am sorry and I am not. If I had written here, I probably wouldn’t have read with my son at night before he went to bed. If I had written here, I probably wouldn’t have fielded so many calls the last couple of weeks from my Relay team. If I had written here, I definitely would not have gotten enough sleep.

I will be writing here every Friday as usual, so look for my entries but sometimes they may be a little shorter than usual, if I want to read to Chris or I need to go to bed on time. We can help other people but we also need to be there for the ones closest to us and take care of ourselves, too. God bless.

Today I'm Going to Pray

Today I’m going to pray. Today I’m going to pray that slaves are freed. I have a lot going on today. I’m still captain of a Relay team, still helping with my son’s boy scout troop, still working a part-time job and taking three master’s level classes.

I’m also planning a move and working on my mother’s estate. But right now, I’m going to join the Global Prayer Gathering (GPG) sponsored by the International Justice Mission (IJM).

The International Justice Mission is a human rights agency that brings rescue to victims of slavery, sexual exploitation and other forms of violent oppression. The GPG is going on today through Sunday.

Sometimes we feel like there’s nothing we can do to help others. We may not have the money or a lot of time. But we can pray.

The Global Prayer Gathering is bringing together friends and IJM staff from around the world to engage in the work of justice through prayer. They say, “Through storytelling, worship and reflection, we will celebrate God’s faithfulness over the past 15 years of IJM’s work, and we will ask for his continued intervention to bring rescue and restoration to those who are still being oppressed.”

You can watch the GPG live or see sessions at your leisure in the On Demand section. You can join the chat room or check them out on Twitter using hashtag #GPG2013.

But whether you join them or not, will you pray?

Bono Needs You

In my younger years, I spent days listening to U2’s dvds (and cassettes, too, admittedly) screaming, “With or without you.” Well, now U2 front man Bono is pushing for change and he has good news.

In a TED conference in February Bono said, “The number of people living in backbreaking, soul-crushing, extreme poverty has declined from 43 percent of the world’s population in 1990 to 33 percent by 2000. And then to 21 percent by 2010. Halved! It’s heart stopping! If you live on less than $1.25 a day, if you live in that kind of poverty, this is not just data. This is everything. This rapid transition is a route out of despair and into hope.” On the trajectory Bono presented, by 2030 there will be zero people living on less than $1.25 per day.

But Bono knows this trend won’t continue “with or without you.” It needs to be nurtured by governments that are eyeing cuts to charitable programs and supported by people so governments don’t make those cuts.

Bono is hoping that the spread of the facts he gives will make believers, or factivists, out of everyone. Here are a few more facts:  Eight million AIDS patients have been receiving retroviral drugs; Malaria deaths have been cut in some countries by 75 percent; the child mortality rate of kids under five is down by 2.65 million deaths a year. These are amazing statistics.

They’re part of the reason why Bono supports the ONE Campaign. I’d heard about the ONE Campaign before, but hadn’t signed up. Its website is both big and simple. Its issues are AIDS, poverty, energy poverty, hunger, and foreign aid, specifically foreign aid from America. 

Uh oh. That’s a hot button. Some people can’t believe that we are sending foreign aid to other countries when we have more people fighting hunger in America and looking for jobs.

Some of it has been politicized. Are we sending aid to the Muslim Brotherhood? I’m not talking about that kind of foreign aid. What I’m talking about is money for medical aid, food, and basic needs.

The people of our country are going through a lot, but should it cut out all aid to other countries? I don’t think so.  Should it cut some? Maybe.

I give to charities that help Americans and I give to charities that help people in other countries. I don’t think the government is the only venue to help, but it is a big one.

Bono got involved in helping others when he was invited by World Vision to go to Ethiopia in 1986. He developed an education program with his wife that used one-act plays and songs to spread information on health, hygiene, and other issues.

We’ve been a sponsor of a child in Africa through World Vision for years. It’s a Christian organization, not a political one.

Bono has supported over 30 different charities in his life. He’s become known for something more than his music, for his hope and leadership in making the world a better place. I know my readers believe in those things, too, which is why I’ve shared some things about Bono with you. He can't make the change he wants to see in the world without you.

Jennifer Lawrence, A Real Winner

In my series on what charities the stars support, I am going to talk about a younger actress who has been very busy this past year. She was featured in the Hunger Games and The Silver Linings Playbook, for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress. She’s also a very kind and compassionate young woman. 

Last month, Lawrence was part of the Silver Linings Playbook’s support of the Glenholme School, a therapeutic boarding school for students with special needs. 

Growing up, Jennifer was friends with Andy Strunk, who has Down syndrome. They met at church and then became close friends in Kammerer Middle School where she helped him get the title of being “Mr. Kammerer” at the school.

She’s also part of a fundraiser for the Kenny Gordon Foundation which funds research regarding sudden cardiac death caused by arrhythmias, scholarships, and a camp for children. 

Going on through March 27, you can bid in an online auction through CharityBuzz to do a walk-on in her next film with Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams and Christian Bale. CharityBuzz provides one of a kind experiences and items for auction in which the money goes to charity.

Lawrence has been involved in charity through the Hunger Games, too. Last year through DoSomething.org and The Thirst Project, there was a campaign by teens to build awareness around the lack of access to clean water in developing nations by organizing water walks in their communities.

Lawrence also did a video with her Hunger Games costar Josh Hutcherson urging fans to help stop hunger. The actors teamed with Feeding America and the World Food Programme to provide meals for the hungry when people take a quiz about hunger.

Lawrence seems like the real thing, someone who cares about her family and friends and also for people who need her help. If you want me to feature your favorite actor or actress in this series, leave a message below and we’ll see who gets the most nominations in our own little academy awards of charity.