Love Without Boundaries has been participating in the Facebook challenge for the past 49 days and the competition ends tomorrow at noon. The organization with the most unique donors of a minimum $10 donation by noon will win $50,000 for their charity!
LWB does amazing work in providing surgeries, nutrition, foster care, and education for China's orphans. I spoke of two volunteers I met while at Hope Healing Home in China on my other blog, GO NEAR. I've copied Amy Eldridge's post from Facebook, taking the liberty in this instant since the deadline is fast approaching. As of right now, LWB is just 47 donors behind, standing in second place.
My message is a bit long today but I hope you will read it to the end. We have just 24 hours left in the Giving Challenge contest on Facebook. 24 hours to try and stay in the lead. And we can’t do it without you.
As I type this, I am staring at the photos of 12 babies who are hurting because they were born with heart disease. Their eyes truly haunt me, first because they are orphaned and as a mother it is hard to accept that any child has to be sick without a mom or dad to comfort them….but second because I know that without surgery, the pictures I have of these children might be their last. Do you know how small a baby’s heart is? And how fragile an orphan’s life is when that tiny heart has a defect? These pictures are of children who are blue, children who are tired, children who NEED OUR HELP.
I also have on my desk the photos of children whose hearts we have healed. They stare out at me with pink cheeks and smiles, and in many…with their new adoptive families. THIS is what it is all about. Saving lives, giving a second chance, and allowing a child to find their family and know complete love.
In the next 24 hours we have a chance to give the GIFT OF LIFE to 10 more children in need. The charity with the most unique $10 donors at 12 noon PST on February 1st will win $50,000. Heart surgery in China averages just $5000 per child, so with that prize….ten children can have a second chance at life.
I am not going to ask you today to find 10 more donors, or even 5 more donors to help us. I am asking you to find just ONE person in your life that hasn’t donated and to ask that person to please help you save a life. For just $10. If all of us do this, we could have over a thousand new donors in just one day.
How often do we spend $10 on things that last just a moment?
$10 for two fancy coffees, $10 for a movie and popcorn, $10 for a dinner out. How about for today, for the next 24 hours, we all find $10 for something that will last a LIFETIME. $10 to save a baby’s life and allow a priceless child (who is orphaned and totally innocent) to get a second chance at finding a family to love them.
Find just one friend in the next 24 hours, and encourage them to join our cause and donate. $10 for the life of a child. Of all the money you have spent this week….this might be the most important.
Thank you EVERYONE for keeping LWB in the running for the top prize. We love our supporters and give thanks everyday for the amazing generosity, compassion, and kindness you show to those who live as orphans each and every day. We truly are a family, bound together by the belief that every child born on this earth matters.
Here’s the link! http://apps.facebook.com/causes/view_cause/51591 Let’s do it for the kids.
Amy
$50,000 could fund the heart surgeries of ten children. Ten lives changed forever. And for only $10.
Please help if you can.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Affluence or Influence?
I'm a procrastinator. I put off the things I don't want to do. I even put off the things I do want to do. So I end up wasting more time than I've any right to.
The point of my intro? I had let my home disintegrate into a serious post-tornadic state between post-Thanksgiving Christmas shopping, illness, China, Iowa, and New Years. So my last free weekends before starting back at my other job were to be dedicated to serious, diehard cleaning. While it did get 98% done, there were a lot of prolonged breaks between toilet scrubbing and ceiling fan dusting.
Unfortunately, I have the propensity to get sucked into many types of reality shows, even though the people may aggravate me greatly or even disgust me. Common sense would say to change the channel or just turn the TV off entirely, but sometimes I just become so udderly shocked that people could live in such a manner that I just can't turn away. I sometimes excuse it as a lesson in psychology or sociology.
One show in particular disgusted me by the commercials alone. However, as is often the case, it came on after another show I had watched and I got sucked in before I could change the channel.
Perhaps you've heart of the new Lifetime show "Top This Party"? If not, the show follows a few top-notch party planners to the monetarily elite. One segment featured a successful real estate mogul who throws an annual Halloween bash for colleagues and friends. Her lavish California home was decorated with $20,000 worth of decorations. And this before she even found the event planner. I believe she budgeted $100-$150K for the actual event.
Another segment featured a 30 year old woman who had taken nearly a year off from the film company she and her husband own after the birth of their first child. She wanted an outrageous party as a sort of I'm-coming-back-to-the-working-world celebration. Her budget, you might ask? $250,000.
When I was a kid, I remember watching "Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous" with Robin Leach. And I think back then I was fascinated and astounded by the opulent houses and beautiful clothes and things these rich people had. A farm girl from rural Iowa couldn't imagine what it would be like to live like that. How amazing!
A couple decades later, I'm still amazed, yes. But in a more sad and sickened way.
As I watched these people spend a quarter of a million dollars on one night's entertainment, you can imagine where my mind went. How many orphans could that feed? How many surgeries would that fund? The one party alone would cover Hope Healing Home's operational costs for five months.
I do not understand the lifestyle of the rich and famous...or not-so-famous. I don't understand how another woman and her personal assistant spent $500,000 on jewelry when children around the world go to bed hungry. How people are living it up in L.A. or New York or Brentwood, TN while a parent on the other side of the world abandons their baby on the doorstep of an orphanage because they cannot afford to get the medical care needed for their child's heart disease or spina bifida or cleft palate.
Perhaps I'm not much better in my own way. I spent $25-$30 splurging on Starbucks during my December travels. A few more dollars and I could have sponsored a child for a month.
And what about non-profits? Perhaps someday I will see the necessity for it, but I continue to scratch my head as I see the pages of pictures of black-tie affairs listed in the society columns for one charity or another. There's backslapping done for the amount of money raised, but how much money was invested in throwing the event? While you may think it's all donated, I've seen firsthand that it does not all come for free.
And then there is the Church. Do we not in some small way play "Top This Party"? Beautifully engineered buildings and impeccably decorated interiors are designed to draw people in, but what's left to send out? We have our five- or six-figure sound systems, but they will not carry the message to the street, the country, or the world.
Rick Warren in his book The Purpose-Driven Church addresses the "importance" of the highest quality sound system your church can afford and the proper seat types and spacing for the optimum church experience. What about the underground churches in places like China? Is the Word less effective huddled in a neighbor's home or the back of a store cloaked in secrecy? I daresay it's much more effective there. We Americans require too much entertainment and comfort.
We need a black-tie event in order to pull out our checkbooks...where the evening attire costs more than our charitable donation.
We need a Sunday morning multimedia event to keep our attention...one that's scheduled so as not to conflict with the football game or our kids' soccer practice. We require a church that doesn't make us feel guilty for giving more for season tickets to the game than what we put in the offering plate.
Perhaps I sound very harsh to you, but I say nothing I have not first preached to myself.
Once again, I heard numerous times before I went to China and after "Oh, I couldn't do that. That would be too hard." It was. And it is.
Because now more than ever, I look at the "wants" and the frivolities of this country we live in and can not simply view them as "wants" or "needs." I think "how many orphans could that help?"
Does anyone really need a Jaguar or could they settle for a Toyota and help a child with HIV?
Do we need the biggest houses our budgets will allow or can we settle for what meets our needs and help build an orphanage?
Does our place of worship need to qualify for "Better Homes and Sanctuaries" or can we keep it simple, worship God, and give away as much as we can?
I do want some nice things in life. I'd love a nice house I can turn into a comfortable home, a big family, and the means to care for us all. But I also want to leave the world a better place. I want to know I did all I could to help as many children as I could with what I had.
I don't want affluence, I want influence. The influence to change at least one little corner of the world and how it goes near to the least of these.
Which would you choose?
The point of my intro? I had let my home disintegrate into a serious post-tornadic state between post-Thanksgiving Christmas shopping, illness, China, Iowa, and New Years. So my last free weekends before starting back at my other job were to be dedicated to serious, diehard cleaning. While it did get 98% done, there were a lot of prolonged breaks between toilet scrubbing and ceiling fan dusting.
Unfortunately, I have the propensity to get sucked into many types of reality shows, even though the people may aggravate me greatly or even disgust me. Common sense would say to change the channel or just turn the TV off entirely, but sometimes I just become so udderly shocked that people could live in such a manner that I just can't turn away. I sometimes excuse it as a lesson in psychology or sociology.
One show in particular disgusted me by the commercials alone. However, as is often the case, it came on after another show I had watched and I got sucked in before I could change the channel.
Perhaps you've heart of the new Lifetime show "Top This Party"? If not, the show follows a few top-notch party planners to the monetarily elite. One segment featured a successful real estate mogul who throws an annual Halloween bash for colleagues and friends. Her lavish California home was decorated with $20,000 worth of decorations. And this before she even found the event planner. I believe she budgeted $100-$150K for the actual event.
Another segment featured a 30 year old woman who had taken nearly a year off from the film company she and her husband own after the birth of their first child. She wanted an outrageous party as a sort of I'm-coming-back-to-the-working-world celebration. Her budget, you might ask? $250,000.
When I was a kid, I remember watching "Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous" with Robin Leach. And I think back then I was fascinated and astounded by the opulent houses and beautiful clothes and things these rich people had. A farm girl from rural Iowa couldn't imagine what it would be like to live like that. How amazing!
A couple decades later, I'm still amazed, yes. But in a more sad and sickened way.
As I watched these people spend a quarter of a million dollars on one night's entertainment, you can imagine where my mind went. How many orphans could that feed? How many surgeries would that fund? The one party alone would cover Hope Healing Home's operational costs for five months.
I do not understand the lifestyle of the rich and famous...or not-so-famous. I don't understand how another woman and her personal assistant spent $500,000 on jewelry when children around the world go to bed hungry. How people are living it up in L.A. or New York or Brentwood, TN while a parent on the other side of the world abandons their baby on the doorstep of an orphanage because they cannot afford to get the medical care needed for their child's heart disease or spina bifida or cleft palate.
Perhaps I'm not much better in my own way. I spent $25-$30 splurging on Starbucks during my December travels. A few more dollars and I could have sponsored a child for a month.
And what about non-profits? Perhaps someday I will see the necessity for it, but I continue to scratch my head as I see the pages of pictures of black-tie affairs listed in the society columns for one charity or another. There's backslapping done for the amount of money raised, but how much money was invested in throwing the event? While you may think it's all donated, I've seen firsthand that it does not all come for free.
And then there is the Church. Do we not in some small way play "Top This Party"? Beautifully engineered buildings and impeccably decorated interiors are designed to draw people in, but what's left to send out? We have our five- or six-figure sound systems, but they will not carry the message to the street, the country, or the world.
Rick Warren in his book The Purpose-Driven Church addresses the "importance" of the highest quality sound system your church can afford and the proper seat types and spacing for the optimum church experience. What about the underground churches in places like China? Is the Word less effective huddled in a neighbor's home or the back of a store cloaked in secrecy? I daresay it's much more effective there. We Americans require too much entertainment and comfort.
We need a black-tie event in order to pull out our checkbooks...where the evening attire costs more than our charitable donation.
We need a Sunday morning multimedia event to keep our attention...one that's scheduled so as not to conflict with the football game or our kids' soccer practice. We require a church that doesn't make us feel guilty for giving more for season tickets to the game than what we put in the offering plate.
Perhaps I sound very harsh to you, but I say nothing I have not first preached to myself.
Once again, I heard numerous times before I went to China and after "Oh, I couldn't do that. That would be too hard." It was. And it is.
Because now more than ever, I look at the "wants" and the frivolities of this country we live in and can not simply view them as "wants" or "needs." I think "how many orphans could that help?"
Does anyone really need a Jaguar or could they settle for a Toyota and help a child with HIV?
Do we need the biggest houses our budgets will allow or can we settle for what meets our needs and help build an orphanage?
Does our place of worship need to qualify for "Better Homes and Sanctuaries" or can we keep it simple, worship God, and give away as much as we can?
I do want some nice things in life. I'd love a nice house I can turn into a comfortable home, a big family, and the means to care for us all. But I also want to leave the world a better place. I want to know I did all I could to help as many children as I could with what I had.
I don't want affluence, I want influence. The influence to change at least one little corner of the world and how it goes near to the least of these.
Which would you choose?
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Does Someone Make a Heart-Sized BandAid?
I spent quite a bit of time uploading photos of my trip to Snapfish today so I can order prints before my account expires. Then tonight I ran to my local Hobby Lobby before my coupon expired so I could buy a few Chinese New Year decorations. I already have my table decked with red table cloth and a Chinese candle holder I found at HL last year.
So I wandered back to my blog awhile ago and started re-reading some of my posts, which brought the tears flowing freely and the ache growing stronger.
I have wanted a little girl for so long. It feels as if I've waited forever. But looking at the boys' pictures, and trying to remember the feeling of them fighting over who got to sit in the middle of my lap or hold my hand down the hall, well...I knew I could love a boy. In fact, I love two boys already. And the ache for them grows wider and deeper as I think of them left behind.
I don't understand why they have to wait there while there are so many families waiting. I don't get to make the rules.
What I do have the power to make is a difference.
If only knew what the next step should be...
So I wandered back to my blog awhile ago and started re-reading some of my posts, which brought the tears flowing freely and the ache growing stronger.
I have wanted a little girl for so long. It feels as if I've waited forever. But looking at the boys' pictures, and trying to remember the feeling of them fighting over who got to sit in the middle of my lap or hold my hand down the hall, well...I knew I could love a boy. In fact, I love two boys already. And the ache for them grows wider and deeper as I think of them left behind.
I don't understand why they have to wait there while there are so many families waiting. I don't get to make the rules.
What I do have the power to make is a difference.
If only knew what the next step should be...
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