Garage Sale

Happy Monday, friends! Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. I'm feeling relaxed and well rested after finally being home for a weekend. I realized that this Saturday was the first day that I was in town all day and not working since June 17th. Craziness. It has been fun though.

One fun thing I did this weekend was have my first ever garage sale! I've been wanting to do this for months and months, but just haven't had the time to go through all my stuff. But last weekend I went on a little girls trip to the lake with some friends, and while I was gone Derek and our summer roommate Keith decided to not only clean our house, but also rearrange our bedroom. I was so excited when I got home Sunday afternoon to a sparkly house, and a room with a new layout that I love so much more than how it was. Since I didn't have any cleaning to do, I decided to take the opportunity to go through our various rooms and clean out drawers and closets, and collect things to sell. Surprisingly, this didn't take as long as I thought it would, so I decided to go ahead and have the sale this past weekend.

After placing little price stickers on all my stuff, placing an ad on Craigslist and putting up a few posters, I opened up at 8 am, and was pleasantly surprised when several cars pulled up at 8 am sharp. It was definitely interesting seeing all the people who showed up, there were all sorts. But it was fun talking to them, and watching a bunch of my stuff leave. Derek left early that morning to go fishing, which I think was a good thing, because when I told him how much I sold stuff for, he couldn't believe how cheap I let it go. It was all stuff that we don't use though, so I was just happy to get it out of the house and thrilled that people were willing to pay to take it off my hands. The sale ended at noon and I had a lot less stuff and just shy of $160 in my pocket.

I decided before the sale that I wanted to donate all the money that I made. Last spring we read the book Radical by David Platt in our small group from church and out of it came the general sentiment that we all have too much stuff while there are billions of people in the world with literally nothing. So why not get rid of alot of the excess in our lives, and use it to benefit those without?

In light of the drought and food crisis in the horn of Africa, I decided to donate a decent portion of the money to World Vision's work in the Horn of Africa Food Crisis. Another organization that I love is Compassion. They just started a Water of Life campaign, where for $55 you can provide a child with a lifetime of clean water. So $55 of our proceeds went there.

Now I hope you all know that I'm not sharing this so you all will think good things about me. Please know that  is not what I am after. My hope is that you would maybe look around your house and see what things you have filling it up that you don't need or even use, and consider having your own garage sale and giving the proceeds away so that others can have food or clean water.