Change A Life…Yours!
You may have noticed (or maybe not) that the title of this post is also the title of this year’s fundraiser…”Change A Life…Yours!” I cannot overstate how important this fundraiser is in the life and ministry of All Things New and it gains in importance each year as our ministry continues to grow. The Jacksonville Fundraiser will take place Friday March 31 from 7:00-8:30pm at Christ’s Church (6045 Greenland Rd). Please click on this link and register for the fundraiser if you yet to do so:
The money that we raise is important both for the ongoing budgetary needs that we have and for the upcoming physical needs that we have. The most important physical need we currently have is to purchase a new (new to us) truck. We currently have 2 trucks but our white truck (if you have been down before you probably remember this one) is on its last lets. It served a great purpose for the past 3 years and we put a lot of crazy miles onto it, including at least 200 trips (oftentimes 3-5 per day) to the old orphanage with a lot of kids in tow! Our black truck, clearly the nicer of the 2, was recently in an accident and has not fully recovered. It still runs well, but there are many things that are slowly starting to fall apart and we would like to make the black truck our new “beater” truck. Aside from that huge need, we are still hoping to purchase some outdoor furniture for our kids, some stand fans for the kid’s home, some new indoor furniture for the kids, a day time a/c for Elijah’s room (we cannot run it at night or our batteries die but it is important to try and keep his room cool as much as possible), a freezer for the kid’s house, and a few other small physical needs. We also need this to be successful to ensure that we can keep each of our employees and continue forward in some of our new ministry initiatives that I am sure you have recently read about on previous blogs and through email.
If you have been down before, you may be wondering why we need some of the items mentioned in the above paragraph for the kid’s house when they require electricity (something that has been missing since the hurricane there). Because of a wonderful donation from the Deerwood Rotary Club, and a special thanks to Jim Henry for putting this together, we have the money raised to outfit the kid’s home with solar panels, batteries, better wiring, and a generator to make sure that they will always have water and electricity when needed! I will blog more about this later, but it was such a wonderful surprise to have this taken care of and we cannot say thank you enough to the Deerwood Rotary Club. They were truly an answer to prayer!
Finally, I want to say a little bit about the title of the fundraiser and why it is so important to All Things New. You may have read in a recent vision casting blog that we desire for our ministry to be more than just a ministry that helps orphans or even more than a ministry that helps people in Haiti. We believe that GOD is using ATN to change the lives of our supporters and the lives of the people who come down to serve with us. We hope that as you and your family get involved in our ministry that it is not just a one-way street where you are giving to us but that it is something that GOD uses to bring you closer to Him. Thank you for praying for us, giving to us, and being a part of our lives and our ministry and we hope to see you at the fundraiser!