Post Holiday Thoughts

I know, kinda weird to talk about the holidays in the middle of January. But just had a couple of thoughts/stories I wanted to share.

First of all, I just went through my first holiday season in 25 years of not being in the retail world. Much more to share from that in a later blog.

Rockin Eve Eve was AWESOME! I heard a lot of great comments after the program. Probably my favorite comment was from a man as he was leaving- "That was cool.....DIFFERENT....but COOL!" Loved that one. I told him I'd take that any day.

The Christmas Eve donut give-away was also cool. Ryan totally rocked getting it organized. Thanks man. I was blessed to be a part of it. We actually gave away 100 dozen donuts and two dozen cookies. I tell this story with permission of the family that did this. One of our core families didn't quite understand how the "program" was supposed to work. So , earlier that day when they were doing their own shopping they remembered they/we were doing some sort of outreach. So , while in the grocery store they bought a couple dozen cookies and gave them to the workers at the neighboring liquor store. Cool. So anyway, later that night I called them to see if they were going to come deliver their allotment of donuts. Their response " We already did it earlier today." "How?" "Uh, we bought our own and delivered them." "Oh ok. Well that'll work." So I was blessed to be able to deliver their "allotment" to the police station. We all had a good laugh about it later.

Another cool story that I also share, with permission of the participants. On December 23rd I got a call here at the office from one of the shelters here in town. The gal on the other end went on to explain the needs of a family in the city. The father had just lost his job, things were tight, etc. The family was not going to be able to have Christmas Dinner. The gal asked if we could help. I assured her we could. I got the pertinent info and hung up. I then started to send out an email to some Elementers asking for help. I was literally in mid-sentence of the email when I felt God say "Call 'Jane Doe' ". So I did. I closed my laptop. Gave 'Jane' a call. And literally within hours 'Jane' and her family had delivered boxes of food to this family. Awesome!

Another blessing for me was to see ALL of the gifts getting wrapped and stacked here in the office for the Adopt-a-Mom families. Cool. Last year I really didn't get to see that part, so that was fun for me. Thank all of you for giving. And thank all of you who shopped, wrapped, and delivered.

There is more, but those were the stories that I got to see from the inside.

Grant